Using Network Analysis to Understand Early Modern Women

Network analysis, a methodology within Digital Humanities, provides an exciting opportunity to better understand early modern women's networks. Networks, interconnected systems of people or things, were an important part of the early modern world, and work on political and patronage networks has been central to historical, art historical, and literary scholarship. Since the late 1980s, women's kinship and social networks have received attention in scholarship on women's families, communities, and alliances. Examinations of aristocratic women's political, familial, and patronage networks by critics such as Barbara Harris and Sharon Kettering were some of the earliest.¹ Women's place within their communities and their creation of communities have also been subject to extensive study, as we see in books by Susan Broomhall and Stephaine Tarbin, Monica Chojnacka, and Bernard Capp.² Moreover, women's alliances are examined in the edited collection by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England, and in Amanda Herbert's Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain.³ Among others, James Daybell has produced extensive scholarship on early modern English women's political and epistolary networks.⁴ In addition, women's literary communities, networks, or circles have been central to understanding early modern women. Margaret Hannay's and Mary Ellen Lamb's work on the Sidney circle, and Julie Crawford's recent scholarship on the same, participate in network studies, as do Micheline White's collection on English women's literary circles and Rebecca D'Monté and Nichole Pohl's collection on women's literary communities.⁵ Julie Campbell has examined gender and literary circles in England, France, and Italy.⁶ Nevertheless, these networks have been reconstructed by hand using traditional methods by scholars with specialized knowledge and, as a result, are relatively limited in size or scope, especially when compared to the networks that can be created with digital tools.

Mark Granovetter, in his 1973 article, makes an early argument for the utility of social network analysis for providing insight into the functions of networks.⁷ More broadly, network analysis entered into the humanities during the 1980s via the history of science, and largely through the work of Bruno Latour and John Law. Latour and Law developed actor network theory, which proposed a relational understanding of networks of humans and things. This understating of networks emphasizes the importance of adding context and description to explain the web of relations that create a network.⁸ The insights of network analysis provide exciting opportunities for understanding early modern women.

Network analysis can make visible what we have not previous been able to see through traditional methods of analysis because it has the ability to reveal the agency of lesser-known actors and to facilitate the study of early modern women and their contexts in more breadth and detail than we have seen using other methods. Network analysis techniques incorporate large amounts of data to present a more complete view of a network as a whole. This method uses data about individuals or objects and their relationships to provide information about the way the network functioned. In doing so, it offers the ability to highlight women's agency and, in some cases, lost or obscured places within early modern networks. It can also provide new or additional information about the centrality of some members over others and the roles of less visible members, including women, in already recognized networks. Network analysis algorithms highlight figures who were important hubs or connectors in networks, as I detail below. We may use these and other centrality measures to assess women's importance in the networks in question and the strength of their ties and their roles in the infrastructure of the networks.

The Method

Networks are created out of nodes and edges. Nodes are entities or units of information, such as individuals, words, phrases, or items. Edges are the links or connections between those items. By adding information to these nodes and edges, called attributes, networks have the possibility to become increasingly more complex and convey additional...