Early Modern Epic Poems
Status: Planned (2026–2028)
Early Modern Epic Poems is a digital humanities project that aims to explore Spanish epic poetry from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries using computational methods. Although epic was the premier literary genre of imperial Spain, it remains underexplored due to its marginal position in the modern canon. This project will use stylometry, topic modeling, and linguistic analysis to trace generic patterns, thematic structures, and stylistic features across a curated corpus of epic poems.
The project pursues four main goals: (1) classify poems based on similarity and genre subtypes, (2) identify dominant themes through probabilistic topic modeling, (3) analyze distinctive linguistic features of epic discourse, such as similes, rhetorical devices, and references to historical figures, and (4) map the geography represented in epic poems through mentioned places. The methods and workflows developed will be made openly available and are transferable to other early modern European corpora.
By combining literary theory with distant reading techniques, this project seeks to reevaluate the cultural significance and narrative strategies of Spanish epic poetry during the so-called Golden Age.