Decoding Morality: A Digital Humanities Approach to Thematic Transitions in Medieval English Morality Plays

Abstract

This research represents a multidisciplinary inquiry into 15^th-century English Morality plays by integrating classical literary analysis with contemporary Digital Humanities (DH) frameworks. Focusing on the seminal text ‘Everyman, the study employs 21^st century computational tools to perform a quantitative linguistic analysis. While historical scholarship has predominantly utilised close reading and psychoanalytic lenses to interpret the protagonist’s journey, this paper provides empirical data to validate these qualitative claims. The analysis reveals a significant thematic transition: a high density of materialistic words in initial stage which evolves into a spiritual vocabulary. Ultimately, this study argues that this data driven methodology is effective not only for archival texts but also for analysing narrative shifts in the most modern literary works.