The Hand of Antwerp: A Dataset of Middle Dutch Deeds (1300-1355) connected to Jan van Boendale

This abstract introduces a dataset containing images and transcriptions of 470 Middle Dutch deeds, written in Antwerp between ca. 1300 and 1355, the period during which Jan van Boendale was active as a municipal clerk. It includes metadata, digital facsimiles, manual diplomatic transcriptions, and a Handwritten Text Recognition model trained on the corpus. The dataset supports a systematic investigation into whether Boendale's literary works display features of an administrative register, using computational methods to detect intertextual overlap between the deeds and his literary oeuvre.

The dataset will be published in the near future, but can already be explored and downloaded via: https://mikekestemont.github.io/deeds-of-antwerp/#/collection/1