Stylistic Change in Early Modern Spanish Poetry Through Network Analysis (with an Especial Focus on Fernando de Herrera’s Role)

Abstract

Early Modern Spanish literature, also known as Golden Age Spanish literature, is a well-established period in the History of Spanish literary tradition, covering from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, from Renaissance to Baroque works. In the case of poetry, the stylistic change from one aesthetic to the other has been examined from a historical point of view, with some scholars considering a transitional group of poets between both stylistic movements, and many pointing to the writer Fernando de Herrera (1534–1597) as a bridge between the Renaissance style of Garcilaso de la Vega (1501–1536) and the Baroque of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627). This paper examines the stylistic change from Renaissance to Baroque in Spanish poetry and Herrera’s place on it from a quantitative, computational point of view, applying a methodology which combines Stylometry and Network Analysis to a big corpus of poems and authors writing in this period. The resulting stylometric network for Renaissance and Baroque poetry proves there is a computationally measurable chronological evolution in the texts of this period, as well as a change of style from Renaissance to Baroque, and supports the existence of a transitional group of poets between these two literary movements, one of which is Fernando de Herrera.