Tracking Textual Similarities in Neo-Latin Drama Networks

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5295–5303 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5295 Tracking Textual Similarities in Neo-Latin Drama Networks Andrea Peverelli,1,2 Marieke van Erp,2 and Jan Bloemendal1 1Huygens ING 2KNAW Humanities Cluster, DHLab Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam, Netherlands andrea.peverelli@huygens.knaw.nl marieke.van.erp@dh.huc.knaw.nl jan.bloemendal@huygens.knaw.nl Abstract This paper describes the first experiments towards tracking the complex and international network of text reuse within the Early Modern (XV-XVII centuries) community of Neo-Latin humanists. Our research, conducted within the framework of the TransLatin project, aims at gaining more evidence on the topic of textual similarities and semi-conscious reuse of literary models. It consists of two experiments conveyed through two main research fields (Information Retrieval and Stylometry), as a means to a better understanding of the complex and subtle literary mechanisms underlying the drama production of Modern Age authors and their transnational network of relations. The experiments led to the construction of networks of works and authors that fashion different patterns of similarity and models of evolution and interaction between texts. Keywords: text reuse, textual similarity, transnationality, Neo-Latin, drama 1. Introduction One of the defining characteristics of the early Modern Era, burgeoning from the Italian Renaissance period, is the wide international network of exchanges between writers of different nationalities that bears the Latin name of respublica literaria (Republic of Letters)1 Au- thors feel part of a wider, universal, intellectual com- munity, and their authorial signal can and must be read especially in light of its complex network of interde- pendent exchanges with other peers. Tracking instances of textual reuse and similarities be- tween works thus comes as the prime reflection of the complexities of the respublica literaria. Relations be- tween authors are primarily expressed through writing and an intense, foregoing discussion upon the reuse of models (that is, the hot topic of imitatio). Besides the vast literary production in the various natu- ral languages of Europe, the early Modern Age is char- acterised by a wide, if barely known, production in Latin from the first sparks of Humanism in the Italian Peninsula during the XIV century. The production of poetry and prose in Latin increased dramatically, and drama began to be involved in this process in great quantities (at least 10,000 works are known from this period; see Bloemendal, Parente, Smith, 2022, for ref- erence). The Low Countries were at the forefront of this revitalisation, thanks especially to the outstanding work of Erasmus. Early Modern Latin (or “Neo-Latin”) was very differ- ent from the one written and spoken in the former me- dieval centuries. According to (Bloemendal and Nor- land, 2013), Neo-Latin was characterised by: “a shift [from the Middle Ages] in the use from a pragmatic one (if necessary, new words could be coined, even ‘unclassical’ ones, and syntactic means could be used as seemed fit), to a principled one, which should aim at writing ‘classical’ Latin morphologically and syn- tactically”. This, paired with the general methodol- ogy …

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