Golden Age Mythological Poems

Mapping and Classifying Early Modern Mythological Narratives Using Digital Text Analysis.

Status: Ongoing (2016–Present)
Funding: Self-funded

This project investigates the Spanish Golden Age’s vibrant tradition of mythological poetry, especially the fábula mitológica, a genre of short epic poems composed between 1550 and 1650. These narrative poems, often inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and popularized by Luis de Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1613), fuse classical mythology with early modern poetics and reflect broader cultural debates on imitation, fiction, and stylistic experimentation.

The project applies digital methods to a curated corpus of 25 fábulas mitológicas (over 150,000 words). It pursues three interrelated goals:

1. Text classification through stylometric analysis (e.g., Stylo in R) to identify stylistic clusters (e.g., “dark,” “clear,” “intermediate” poems);
   
2. Lexical profiling to assess the density and function of cultismos and classical references;
   
3. Literary cartography using Recogito to annotate and visualize the geographic imagination of early modern poets.

Initial results show a mythological geography centered on the Mediterranean and classical antiquity, but also incorporating modern Iberian references. The project also refines authorial attributions and challenges traditional stylistic classifications in the Góngora tradition.

All data, scripts, and findings are made openly available in TEI/XML and CSV formats, supporting further research in early modern poetics and the digital humanities.

Related links

• GitHub Repository
• 2025. “Mapping Early Modern Hispanic Mythological Poems with Recogito.” In Digital Humanities in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Texts, edited by Roberto J. González Zalacain and Gael Vaamonde, 101st–117th ed. Oxon & New York: Routledge.
• 2017. “Luis de Góngora y La Fábula Mitológica Del Siglo de Oro: Clasificación de Textos y Análisis Léxico Con Métodos Informáticos.” Studia Aurea 11 (0): 111–42. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/studiaaurea.260.