Thesis title: La codificazione dell’endecasillabo nella poesia castigliana quattro-cinquecentesca: i sonetti di Juan Boscán
This study focuses on the crucial role played by Juan Boscán’s poetic production in the process of adaptation of the sonnet to early sixteenth-century Castilian lyric poetry. Starting from a reconstruction of the genesis of Petrarchism – from the shaping of the Petrarchan model to the first fifteenth-century experiments with the hendecasyllable in the Iberian area, with particular attention to the emblematic texts of proto-Petrarchism, including Villalpando’s four sonnets, the forty-two sonnets of the Marquis of Santillana and Gómez Manrique’s canzoniere –, the research aims to clarify how Boscán contributed to the transmission of the metrical and rhythmic patterns, rhetorical devices and thematic motifs of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, adapting them to sixteenth-century Castilian poetry, still bound to late medieval tradition.
The methodology combines a detailed metrical-prosodic analysis with a lexical and rhyme-based investigation of a textual corpus that consists of the author’s one hundred sonnets. The data (syllabic-accentual patterns, rhymes, rhyming vocabulary) have also been implemented on the website Boscán en versos – a project funded by the PNRR and developed with Professor Stefano Milonia’s support, Romance philologist and expert in Digital Humanities, using the software programme Drupal 10 –, which includes the transcription of the one hundred sonnets, their metrical-prosodic schemes and the digital reproduction of the corresponding pages of Boscán’s autograph manuscript (the Lastanosa–Gayangos Manuscript, Ms. 17969, held at the Biblioteca Nacional de España). Furthermore, each text has been enriched with interactive connections and hypertextual cross-references to facilitate the analysis of rhyme frequencies and recurring lexical groupings.
This research consolidates Boscán’s status as the first Castilian Petrarchist: his sonnets, while still showing traces of the autochthonous tradition – anchored to the use of the octosyllable – and residual metrical-prosodic features of the arte mayor verse, are characterized by the predominant use of heroic hendecasyllables and by the combination of these formal choices with rhythmic recurrences and rhyme patterns that decisively contribute to the unity and cohesiveness of what can be defined as a Petrarchist canzoniere, albeit one with its own specific features.
The analysis also highlights how the metrical-prosodic structure of a poem is not merely a formal element, but actively shapes a true “existential itinerary” of the lyrical self: the arrangement of primary and secondary stresses, the recurrence of specific rhythmic patterns, the rhyme choices and the rhythmic-semantic connections have rhetorical-thematic and stylistic repercussions that reinforce the representation of a fragmented and divided inner consciousness, clearly of Petrarchan lineage, yet expressed in ways rooted in the Castilian literary context and in the author’s biographical experience.
This investigation, therefore, opens the way for a more in-depth study about early Castilian Petrarchism in the strict sense, proposing a reading model that integrates metrical-prosodic analysis, digital tools and textual interpretation to explain how, in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the process of codification and crystallization of the sonnet in Castilian poetry took shape.