Traditional attribution of anonymous medieval sermons has relied on historical circumstance: which cleric held which post, whose library housed which manuscript, whose known writings share a theme. A newer, quantitative approach—stylometry—instead counts the frequencies of common function words, on the premise that such habits lie below an author's conscious control and thus resist deliberate imitation. When the two methods agree, an attribution is strengthened; when they conflict, interpretation grows fraught. Skeptics of stylometry note that scribes routinely altered spelling and phrasing as they copied a text, so the word-frequency 'fingerprint' a program detects may belong as much to a copyist as to the original author. Advocates respond that aggregating many texts averages out such noise, though they concede that a single heavily edited manuscript can mislead the method badly.