(RE)BUILDING
NETWORKS
A Medieval and Early Modern Studies Conference
ABSTRACTS
WOMEN'S NETWORKS
Katherine L. French, Department of History, University of Michigan
“Women’s Social Networks and Friendships in Late Medieval Westminster: Problems and Possibilities”
Home to both the royal courts and Westminster Abbey, Westminster is well-served by its surviving archives. The variety and extent of Westminster’s own records coupled with royal ones makes prosopographical analysis possible down to a relatively low social level. While Gervase Rosser recognized these possibilities in his 1989 book Medieval Westminster (Oxford), he was primarily interested in the curses honorem of civic office holding and its role in creating and preserving Westminster’s stability.
Prosopography can also be used to recover varieties of associations, even for women who appear less frequently in medieval records than men. Whom their husbands served when filling public offices, where they lived, their parish involvement, and who they mentioned in their wills, if they left one, can all be used to recover a variety of associations among women that suggest possible social networks and even friendships. However, the fact that men served together as constables or churchwardens does not automatically make their wives friends or even acquaintances. Thus, this paper will argue that in order to recover urban women’s networks, it is not enough simply to add them to their husband’s networks. Associations based upon physical proximity, their husbands’ office holding, or parish activities need to be considered within the context of women’s involvement in childbirth and death preparations, along with women’s changing needs and priorities over the course of their life-cycle. Thus the case of Westminster provides an opportunity to theorize about what brought women together and when these interactions became networks.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 9:15am and 10:45am, in Tawes 2115.
David Norbrook, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford
“Triangulation and Solidarity in Women’s Intellectual Networks: Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson”
A generation or so ago, scholarship on women’s writing often focussed on women’s oppositional status as a marginalized other, silenced by patriarchy. A growing body of scholarship has shown what a significant role women did play, and made that simple model of direct repression untenable. I want to focus on some constraints that still remained, and to highlight them by looking at some blockages and obstructions to communication. Historians of women’s writing have looked for women who situated themselves as part of a distinctively female tradition. But very often such traditions seem to have been imposed from outside, not only by modern feminists but by contemporary male historians of learned women. I suggest that early modern women intellectuals often interacted in an oblique, almost subliminal way that cannot be charted on conventional maps of intellectual exchanges, by a process of triangulation through mediating male figures. We can find occasional women on the kinds of maps of the republic of letters that are currently being prepared, as in the ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’, ‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’ and ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ projects, but if we look more closely we can find more subliminal connections. I want to take two case-studies from 17th-century England: Lady Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson, some of whose relations with contemporary women writers were significantly suppressed in their own self-presentations and emerge only through a more indirect approach.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 9:15am and 10:45am, in Tawes 2115.
NETWORKED BOOKS
Stefano Gulizia, Modern Languages Department, Bronx Community College (CUNY)
“Early Modern Book-Trading and Networks Theory: A Sea-to-Inland Perspective”
This paper examines one discrete problem of network theory as a vehicle of transmission over space: the “back-ripple” effect along continuous network lines, as it has been discussed by Albert-Lásló Barabási in his scale-free model and by other computational scientists; moreover, I seek to apply this theory to Mediterranean history, following the example of Irad Malkin in his reconsideration of Greek colonization, and specifically to sixteenth-century print culture in order to show that micro-regional, local developments in emporia formally subject to Venetian domination were responsible for major scientific and literary innovations back at home. In other words, my aim is to surpass reified ideas of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, or margin and heart, and concentrate instead on the “tying in” of coasts and sea.
It is not enough to observe the industrial expansion of presses in Venice, as I suggest; we must also understand what printers, book-sellers and brokers were doing in Dalmatia, the Aegean, Istanbul, and especially Cyprus. Cyprus offers the historical evidence for the backward ripple effect I chose to illustrate here. For this demonstration, my paper documents three episodes: Francesco Marcolini’s mysterious commercial voyage to Cyprus in 1546, the activities of Michiel Membré, a businessman from the island who was appointed dragoman to the Sublime Porte, and finally the spectacular attempt of the philosopher Francesco Patrizi to purchase a stock of books and sell them to Philip II of Spain in his efforts to supply the library of Escorial of Greek, Eastern and Byzantine materials.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 11:00am and 12:30pm, in Tawes 2115.
April G. Shelford, Department of History, American University
“Exchanging Books & Confirming Community in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica”
This paper uses the journals and commonplace books of the [in]famous Jamaican slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood to reconstruct the informal network of book exchanges that he and his friends created and maintained in the “frontier” parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica, from the 1750s into the 1770s. They lived in a parish where the white population was too small to establish a book club, which emerged early in eighteenth-century England to serve readers living in rural areas. Nor could they follow the lead of North American colonial cities such as Charlestown and found a subscription library. The paper identifies and characterizes the “core” participants in that group, which changed substantially over time, their “protocols” for exchanges, and what they exchanged. It discusses how their book exchange network mapped onto other means of strengthening community bonds, especially in the context of a local plantation economy in which slaves came to outnumber whites by nearly twenty to one. Finally, it demonstrates how a small and intensely local network could accomplish the cultural work of connecting its participants to the world of Enlightenment intellectual culture.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 11:00am and 12:30pm, in Tawes 2115.
Paul A. Broyles, Department of English, University of Virginia
“Textual Networks, Compilation, and the Problem of Medieval Genre”
Codicological research has long recognized that individual medieval books, even miscellanies, can reveal assumptions compilers held about the texts they copied. Research on individual volumes, like the Robert Thornton’s manuscripts, has shown that medieval compilation practices encode genre and textual affiliation.
This paper explores what we can learn about medieval literary classification by examining a body of manuscripts in aggregate. Using data from the Digital Index of Middle English Verse, I consider the entire corpus of Middle English poetry as a network of poems linked when copied together. By visualizing and analyzing this network of texts, I probe how texts are affiliated and categorized. Considering the whole textual network confirms (as expected) that compilations like the Canterbury Tales and South English Legendary constitute distinct bodies. But it also reveals surprising affiliations, and challenges assumptions about the literary subdivisions.
In this paper, I discuss this approach’s promise, arguing that treating texts as a large-scale network offers a fresh understanding of affiliation and genre by allowing us to understand a corpus not just as a body but as a network of relationships among texts. I also explore challenges that this research poses: data like the DIMEV raises important questions about what delineates a text, and reveals unspoken assumptions that underlie our cataloguing. Textual networks, offering the ability to look at whole corpuses from above, suggest intriguing macroanalytic approaches that allow us to think at the level of the tradition and offer new insight into how texts are connected to each other.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 11:00am and 12:30pm, in Tawes 2115.
MATERIALIZING NETWORKS
Thomas Hahn, Department of English, University of Rochester
“Artistic Piracy and Economic Expansion in Early 16th Century Europe”
In 1508 the international joint stock companies led by the Welsers and Fuggers of Augsburg received a report from an agent who had made the sea voyage from Lisbon to India and back. They commissioned a local master, Hans Burgkmair, to create a portfolio of stunning engravings that circulated as the equivalent of an initial public offering: these large-scale serial prints showed the peoples of West, South, and East Africa and of India in a series of ethnographic “glyphs.” On December 1st of the same year, the Antwerp printer Jan van Doesborgh issued Die Reyse van Lissebone, a Dutch translation of the agent’s account adorned with woodcuts pirated from Burgkmair’s designs, reduced to fit the quarto pages of his pamphlet. Within the next year or two, van Doesborgh reused the same cuts in a Latin broadsheet on the New World, and in Of the newe landes, a printed compendium which contains the first reference to America in English. In 1509 a Nürnberg printer issued a German translation of the agent’s travelogue in a booklet accompanied by re-fitted designs from Burgkmair and some entirely new images by the engraver Wolf Traut. In 1510 the Nürnberg printer Georg Glockendon re-cut and sensationalized Burgkmair’s original images, and then reprinted these in 1511. The bankers, artists, and printers – from Bavaria to the Low Countries to England and implicitly to Portugal and India – all fed off one another in advertising Europe’s new global outreach to a wide spectrum of readers and viewers. This paper will trace out the circuit traveled by these investments – material, financial, visual, and discursive – over this compressed moment of exchange.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 1:30pm and 3:30pm, in Ulrich Recital Hall.
Kelly D. Cook, Landscape Architecture Program, University of Maryland
“The Artist Without a Face: Anonymity and the Networks of Influence in Renaissance France”
This paper will take on the challenge of contextualizing an artist’s work, when the author’s identity is essentially uncertain or anonymous, by investigating how the surrounding network of aesthetic and intellectual ideas can be used to decipher the meanings and intentions behind works produced in this situation. Using the enigmatic prints of the artist known as Juste de Juste, I will discuss the stylistic and cultural factors that informed these prints’ brief foray into a hyper-experimental style of figural rendering concurrent with the School of Fontainebleau and its elaboration of a unique visual idiom during the mid-16th century. Sources for the design of these prints will consider primarily the work of Rosso Fiorentino and Michelangelo, amongst others. Culling information from art historical and history of science-related sources, it is possible to suggest a meaning for these prints that goes beyond the typical designation of said images as merely ornamental, or simply depicting “dancers” or “acrobats”. The research will in turn focus on how such images were then consumed within the contingent network of elite consumption, an aspect that impacted the prints’ specific physical appearance and experimental character.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 1:30pm and 3:30pm, in Ulrich Recital Hall.
Alicia Walker, History of Art, Bryn Mawr College
Pseudo-Arabic, Christian Spiritual Authority, and Medieval Monastic Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean
“Things” can help us understand social identities, relationships, and practices in the medieval world, especially in situations where textual documentation is minimal or completely absent. This paper explores how pseudo-Arabic motifs on medieval Christian buildings and objects materialized social identities and spiritual authority among monastic communities across the eastern Mediterranean, thereby attesting to an interconnectedness that is only thinly documented in the written record. When contextualized within networks of religious, cultural, and political traffic, pseudo-Arabic “inscriptions” reify social affiliations and distinctions, although not always in a manner consistent with modern assumptions about linguistic identity in the medieval Mediterranean world. In some instances, (pseudo-)Arabic operated as a sign of Islamic political and cultural groups and could be asserted or subverted to articulate shifting power dynamics between Christians and Muslims. Yet in other instances, (pseudo-)Arabic was generated and sustained within exclusively Christian networks. In the latter contexts, it could stand instead for the authority of ancient monastic communities in the Holy Land, a region where Arabic was not only the dominant colloquial language but also a language of Orthodox Christian theological discourse. While this paper is rooted in close scrutiny of medieval objects, monuments, texts, and contexts, it simultaneously engages modern theoretical frameworks that elucidate how things forge and maintain social relationships and identities (especially the work of Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ian Hodder, and concepts that have shaped scholarship on medieval artistic networks, such as “the social life of things” and “portability”).
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 1:30pm and 3:30pm, in Ulrich Recital Hall.
AUTHORS AND READERS
Colin Wilder, Center for Digital Studies, University of South Carolina
“A Topography of Author-Text Networks among the Early Modern German Intelligentsia”
This lecture will present a topography of large-scale author-text networks from the early modern German intelligentsia. To collect data, I use the Dirty History Crawler (DHC) tool, a Python program that constructs, de-duplicates and cleans bibliographic data from WorldCat. The dataset featured here consists of several thousand authors and books. The authors are all of the primary professors of law at the University of Marburg from its inauguration in 1520 through the Napoleonic Wars – as well as all people with whom those professors “co-authored” texts, meaning essentially whose works they themselves translated, anthologized or otherwise republished, as well as student-mentor co-publications. To situate the analysis of this network, I will give a brief account of the state of scholarship applying network analysis to the study of book history. I will also offer some suggestions for fine-tuning the study of such networks over long periods of time, especially considering time horizons and edge directionality. This is followed finally by a topography – a summary of the structure and features – of the author-text networks under consideration. The topography focuses on centrality measures and communities. To give focus to this giant landscape, I will make recourse on several occasions to close consideration of the life and work of two illustrious jurists in this network, namely Hermann Vultejus (a widely connected legal humanist of the 16th century) and Johann Georg Estor (a polymath of the 18th). Finally, I will also briefly introduce the Dirty History Crawler as a tool. DHC has been developed at the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina and can be found at http://sc.edu/about/centers/digital_humanities/projects/dhc.php.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 4:00pm and 5:30pm, in Ulrich Recital Hall.
Michiel van Groesen, Early Modern History, Leiden University
“How to Network a Book: Printed Newspapers and the Birth of Advertising in Early Modern Amsterdam”
Commercial networks in the early modern book trade are generally known only through imprints: Typical examples include two booksellers working together to co-finance a publication, or a publisher-entrepreneur and an artisan-printer whose names appear together on a printed title-page. This paper aims to uncover a second way to establish commercial connections in the book trade, focusing on networks of distribution rather than production. It will do so through an analysis of hundreds of advertisements for forthcoming books in early printed newspapers. The case that will be discussed is that of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, which at the time was Europe's center of journalism and newspaper advertising. All surviving Dutch corantos, starting from 1618, have recently been digitized, enabling us to analyze a comprehensive set of records to pose new questions - and find new answers to old ones - about networks of distribution in the early modern book trade.
This paper will be presented on Friday, October 9, between 4:00pm and 5:30pm, in Ulrich Recital Hall.
SIX DEGREES OF FRANCIS BACON: A PRACTICUM
Jessica Otis, Data Curation for Early Modern Studies, Carnegie Mellon University
Daniel Shore, Department of English, Georgetown University
Christopher Warren, Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University
This session centers on Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB), a digital representation of the social networks of Britain between 1500 and 1700. Participants in this hand-on practicum will work with the SDFB team for an hour and a half in a UMD computer lab to explore the early modern British social network and inquire into the potential of large-scale social networks more generally. We will begin with a brief overview of the statistical inference and machine learning procedures used to generate the network from the early modern entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Through a number of exercises structured around their interests, participants will explore the current SDFB website, either individually or in small groups as computing resources allow. By the end of the session, they will be able to:
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assess the strengths and limitations of the SDFB network inference procedures
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navigate, search, filter, and interpret the network according to their research aims
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discover new or likely relationships at multiple degrees of separation
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modify, augment, and correct the inferred network based on their expert knowledge of early modern persons and relationships
We will wrap up with a group discussion that will begin with the SDFB will but move directly to questions about the utility of large-scale social networks for interdisciplinary scholarship. Questions will include: How can networks illuminate the relations between elite and non-elite historical persons? Who gets left out of even the most inclusive social networks? How might social networks be integrated into more established research practices?
This session will take place on Saturday, October 10, between 9:00am and 10:30am, in Tawes 0223.
CASE STUDIES
Megan Moran, Department of History, Montclair State University
“Female Networks, Political Ties, and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy”
This paper explores the central role that female networks played in the construction of political ties, patronage associations, and diplomacy in early modern Italy. Through letters, patrician women created widespread networks of political association across a variety of spaces. Their letters traversed the boundaries of the household as well as the city-state (and beyond the Italian peninsula) as they transformed the informal nature of family and friendship bonds into more formal political networks for their families. The letters from women in the Venetian Cappello family to Bianca Cappello, the new wife of Francesco I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the letters exchanged between Maria Nobili Ricasoli in Florence to her daughter, serving at the court of Marie de’Medici in France, and sons, fighting in northern Europe for the Medici and Habsburg forces, serve as case studies to investigate the formation, practice, and function of these networks. The case studies suggest that women’s family and friendship ties facilitated an exchange of news and a space for women to speak about family, community, and civic events inside and outside of the home. Through the construction of family networks, the exchange of services and favors, forming introductions, and sending recommendations, patrician women actively connected their households to the Medici and the growing Tuscan state as well as political allies in France and the Habsburgs lands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 10:45am and 12:15pm, in Tawes 1105.
Leonardo Francalanci, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Notre Dame
“Building cultural networks across the Mediterranean: the epistolary of Mallorcan humanist Arnau Descós”
In this paper I would like to explore the main characteristics of the cultural network established by fifteenth-century humanist Arnau Descós through his epistolary.
Born in the island of Mallorca and educated in Naples during –or immediately after– the reign of Alfonso V of Aragon the Magnanimous (1396-1458), the study of Descós’ Latin epistolary reveal a broad variety of personal and intellectual relations across family, social and national boundaries. The receivers of his epistolae spread across the entire Western Mediterranean (Mallorca, Naples, Barcelona, Valencia, Toledo, Salamanca, Rome, Montpellier), and includes Arnau’s closest family members as well as famous humanists and important religious and political figures of the time. The topics and style of his letters are also the most various: alongside erudite Latin epistolae worthy of the best humanistic tradition, in fact, his epistolary contains personal correspondence, devotional letters and even poems in Catalan. It even contains literary jests. One epistle, for example, contains an imitation of one of Martial’s epigrams: in it, Arnau praises the quality of some preserved mushrooms that his sending to his brother alongside his letter.
Descós’ epistolary is a great example of what a global network looked like in the fifteenth-century. Though the use of Latin, the author is able to reach beyond the island of Mallorca and beyond his social status, in order to build a wide network of social and cultural relations across different territories, languages and cultures.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 10:45am and 12:15pm, in Tawes 1105.
Lara Yeager-Crasselt, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
“All Roads Lead to Rome: Reconstructing Artistic Networks between the Netherlands and Italy”
This paper addresses the significant role played by artistic, social and economic networks in fostering the artistic exchange between the Netherlands and Italy in the early modern period. Northern artists traveled south, and above all to Rome, with increasing regularity from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. As a site of rich artistic, cultural and historical importance, Rome provided artists with newfound inspiration, as well as professional potential. By the 1620s, the number of Northerners in the city had grown to such a number that the first cohesive association of Netherlanders emerged. Called the Schildersbent, or Bentvueghels (literally, ‘birds of a common feather’), the group provided artists with a social and cultural community in a foreign city, but it also offered a network of artists and patrons that eased the transition into this new environment. Scholars have largely addressed the activities of the ‘Bent’ and its oft-cited ‘profligate’ cultural identity in the seventeenth century, but little consideration has been given to the ways in which the group functioned as a network. Taking a broader perspective on the topic, this paper will address how such networks functioned – as lived experiences and within a conceptual framework – between North and South, and the ways in which they gained their meaning. Central to this discussion is the role that an artist’s native urban identity played in defining his networks abroad. Artists coming from certain cities in the Netherlands, such as the well-known example of Utrecht, and the less-studied instance of Brussels, particularly bonded together in the eternal city. How and why these relationships developed – and how they diverted from this model – sheds new light on the significance of early modern networks in an artistic context.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 10:45am and 12:15pm, in Tawes 1105.
NETWORKED NATURAL HISTORY
Francesco G. Sacco, University of Calabria and Warburg Institute
“Virtuosi, Craftsmen, and Merchants: Knowledge Networks in the Early Royal Society”
The aim of this paper is to analyse the new kind of knowledge networks constructed by the early Royal Society of London (founded in 1660). Influenced by Francis Bacon’s project of a new instauration of human learning, English so-called virtuosi founded one of the most important scientific academies in early modern Europe. One of the aims of the Society was to fill the gap between the learned natural philosophers, craftsmen, merchants and explorers. The strategies to attain this goal were essentially the following. Since 1662, the Society obtained the patronage of the then King, Charles II Stuart. Therefore, they enjoyed the privilege to use diplomatic postal service. Thanks to this privilege, the first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, built an impressive network connecting almost every natural philosopher interested in the new science in the British Isles and in the Continent.
The fellows also tried to obtain useful descriptions of the newly discovered lands by merchants, explorers and diplomats. Moreover, they supported the participation of craftsmen (such as instruments makers) in the activities of the Society. Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, William Petty and many other virtuosi elaborated different and sometime contrasting strategies to attain these results.
This paper will reconstruct these strategies, linking them to existing different interpretations of the Baconian project of a new, collective, and experimental history of nature. My analysis will also challenge the prevailing view of the Society as an aristocratic club, whose main social function consisted of supporting of the Stuart Restoration. The existence of wide networks linking experimental philosophers, craftsmen, merchants and explorers suggests in fact, a different interpretation of the social role of the Society in early modern Britain.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 10:45am and 12:15pm, in Tawes 1107.
Kellie Robertson, Department of English, University of Maryland
“The Physics of Love”
This paper brings together two subjects that are generally kept apart, both in popular thought and by academic disciplines: love and physics. They are usually imagined as “non-overlapping magisteria,” to repurpose a phrase coined by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Each occupies its own sphere and is assumed to obey different laws. Love concerns the human; physics the nonhuman, from subatomic particles to the motions of the universe. Yet for medieval writers, both popular and academic, these domains not only overlapped, but they were also thought to operate according to the same principles.
My paper argues that in order to fully understand late medieval writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, we must understand how he participated in late medieval natural philosophical networks, both learned and popular. Unlike today’s largely mathematical discipline, medieval natural philosophy—what we call “physics”—was primarily a textual endeavor; like medieval poetry, it was a set of interpretive practices that sought to divide up the material world, making it more amenable to human view. This paper investigates the historical and philosophical circles that would have made Chaucer’s poetry legible to a contemporary audience, tracing not just a shared vocabulary but also—and more importantly—an orienting set of questions about the moral authority of the natural world and the writer’s ability to claim this authority when representing his or her own experience.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 10:45am and 12:15pm, in Tawes 1107.
MAKING NETWORKS VISIBLE
Kelsey Flynn, Department of History, George Washington University
“Making the Covert Visible: Anglo-Atlantic Intelligence Networks and the English Embassy in
Madrid, 1605-1625”
From 1605-1625, English diplomats in Spain constructed complex networks of informants and spies that spanned Europe and the Atlantic in order to compete for trade and territories in the New World. This project was challenging; England and Spain had only recently renewed diplomatic relations after nearly twenty years of war. James I took advantage of the newly signed peace by ordering his diplomats in Spain to establish networks of intelligence agents who decoded Spanish ciphers, tracked the Spanish West Indian fleet, and copied the minutes of the Council of the Indies. These networks were far-reaching and multinational. The port cities of Seville and Lisbon were peopled with sailors and merchants arriving from and departing for the West Indies. Ambassadors co-opted these agents in order to gain, corroborate, and communicate the most accurate information about Spain’s empire.
In this paper I will detail the strategies for, and challenges of, reconstructing these intelligence networks. While evidence of these networks can be found in the correspondence between statesmen in England and their foreign diplomats, in order to protect the identity of these agents, most of this correspondence was written in cipher and nearly all informants were either unidentified or assigned code names. Accurately identifying these agents and reconstructing their networks provides a deeper understanding of the covert arm of Europe’s Atlantic imperial contest and the “entangled” nature of this space.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 2:15pm and 3:30pm, in Tawes 1100.
Ruth Ahnert, Department of English, Queen Mary University of London
Sebastian Ahnert, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge
“Tudor Networks in the Digital Age”
The word ‘network’ has its origins in net-making, describing the weaving of materials such as threads or wires. Now, more often, it is used metaphorically to denote various kinds of complex systems of interrelated things, from telecommunications routes and computer networks, to neural pathways and biological regulatory networks, ecological systems and social networks. More specifically, ‘complex networks’ describes a burgeoning field of study: despite the hugely divergent nature of the different networks listed above – and, indeed the differing scholarly fields within which they are normally studied – a series of key publications in the 1990s and early 2000s showed that complex systems like these share an underlying order and follow simple laws, and therefore can be analyzed using the same mathematical tools and models. This paper seeks to explore what these methods offer to the humanities. It will provide an introduction to the methods and measures employed in network analysis, highlighting algorithms particularly useful for social network analysis, using two separate bodies of early modern letters as a means of illustration. As such, then, this is a paper about methods rather than findings, and its ultimate aim is to show that network analysis provides a realistic way of reconstructing and analyzing the movement of people, objects, and ideas.
This paper will be presented on Saturday, October 10, between 2:15pm and 3:30pm, in Tawes 1100.
NETWORKS AND INTERFACES: PRESENTATION AND CLOSING CONVERSATION
David Wallace, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
“European Literary History: Networks and Interfaces”
Over the last seven years I have been involved with two projects that seek to map European literary history in ways that escape the conceptual confines of nineteenth-century, nation-state-based historiography. The first is a collaborative literary history of Europe, 1348-1418, soon to be published in 2 volumes and 82 chapters by Oxford University Press; the project website may be found here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~dwallace/europe/
The second is a project called Interfaces, funded by the Danish government and run between the Universities of York (UK) and Southern Denmark. The aim here is to develop new networks for Medieval Studies that, again, escape traditional 'nation state' boundaries. The group sponsors an online journal called Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literature. Essays, published in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish, may be downloaded for free (no pay wall) from the following link: http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/interfaces/index
Discussions in this our final session can take points of departure from both these ventures and, of course, from our discussions at (Re)Building Networks.
This talk will be take place on Saturday, October 10, between 4:00pm and 5:30pm, in Tawes 1100.