Stilometrische Annäherungen an den italienischen Petrarkismus

Abstract

Few authors have shaped the history of European poetry as much as Petrarch (1304-1374). This is largely due to the poetic style of his most important Italian text, a collection of love poems entitled Canzoniere, which became an important poetic model for centuries. Scholars usually use the word “Petrarchism” to refer to Petrarch’s influence on the literary landscape, although the exact definition of the term continues to be under discussion. One reason for this may be the fact that few studies of Petrarchism focus on a larger corpus of texts. The analysis of a comprehensive corpus of Petrarchan poetry, however, could not only offer the possibility of testing existing definitions on a larger basis, but furthermore make a quantitatively sound contribution to a better understanding of Petrarchism.

Drawing on existing definitions of Petrarchism, this paper examines a corpus of 55 Italian poetry collections using digital stylometric, co-occurrence, and network analyses.