Medieval Discourse about Humans. An analysis of the discourse about humans in the Middle Dutch Sidrac.

Abstract

As a part of the Middle Dutch artes genre, Sidrac is comparable to the modern popular science book. It was written in the vernacular and was meant for a lay audience. This thesis is about the discourse about humans in Sidrac, because humans occur in the text numerous times. Because Sidrac was written in the form of a dialogue, each question and its answer have been considered as a unit. To select the relevant units for the analysis, a distant reading method was used. The same method served as a tool to make a preliminary layout for the final step, which was a discourse analysis of the selected units. The answer to the research question 'What are the prominent aspects in the discourse about humans in Sidrac' was mostly religious. It turns out that within the discourse about humans, religious issues such as sins, the afterlife, God as a spiritual being, and the original sin of Adam and Eve, are prominent. Other topics such as nutrition and the micro- and macrocosm occur as well. Especially the religious topics are clearly connected to each other through the discourse used in each unit.