Petrarch’s Poetic Style from a Computational Perspective: A Digital Quantitative Approach to Italian Petrarchism

Abstract

Few authors have shaped the history of European poetry as much as Petrarch (1304–1374). Based on its remarkable poetic style, Petrarch’s most important Italian text, a collection of love poems called Canzoniere not only had an enormous impact on the poetry of his time but also became a model for centuries to come. Scholars usually use the term “Petrarchism” to refer to Petrarch’s influence on the literary landscape. Yet despite this common notion, there are still many competing approaches to defining Petrarchism. One reason for this may be the reliance of most studies of Petrarchism on a fairly small corpus of texts. While many scholars give a detailed account of Petrarch’s influence on a single work or poet, only a few analyses of Petrarchism are based on a larger corpus. This may also help explain why there is still no comprehensive inventory of the stylistic or semantic elements that distinguish Petrarchism. The goal of this essay is to take a first step towards creating such an inventory. To this end, digital methods, in particular stylometric and co-occurrence analyses, are applied to a corpus of 55 Italian poetry collections in order to determine the characteristic features of Italian Petrarchism.