Corpus

This corpus consists of 55 different Italian collections of poems that date mainly from the 14th, 15th or 16th centuries. It contains two parts: the target part includes 51 poetry collections (10,212,741 characters in total) in which researchers had been able to show Petrarch’s influence. The comparison part, on the other hand, includes most of the Italian love poetry that appeared before Petrarch’s Canzoniere (four collections of poetry or 680,707 characters in total). All but one of the texts in the corpus (Guido Zaccagnini, G./Amos Parducci: Rimatori siculo-toscani del dugento. Laterza 1915 https://www.liberliber.it/online/autori/autori-r/rimatori-siculo-toscani-del-dugento/rimatori-siculo-toscani-del-dugento/) are based on scholarly editions produced by a reputable editor and publisher. The digital versions of these editions are available in the Biblioteca Italiana (http://www.bibliotecaitaliana.it/) digital library. In all of these texts, the following items were removed: punctuation marks, page and line numbers, footnotes, endnotes, headings, title pages, forewords, epilogues and any other comments. Moreover, passages explicitly identified as prose texts (for example, dedications, comments and authors’ introductions) were deleted, and all majuscules were converted to minuscules. Otherwise, the corpus was not harmonised any further at a linguistic level. Each collection of poems was saved as a plain text file with UTF-8 encoding.