Tudor Networks of Power

Tudor Networks of Power is a collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist that reconstructs and computationally analyzes the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history. It employs methods from network science to ask questions about the structure, geographical reach, surveillance, and biases of the Tudor government's intelligence network, and has applications for other large bodies of humanities data.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 12 October 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Tudor Networks of Power is a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specializing in complex networks. Together, they have reconstructed and computationally analyzed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers. The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers from the Tudor period provide crucial information about the textual organization of the social network centered on the Tudor government. Whole libraries have been written using this archive, but until now, nobody has had access to the macroscopic tools that allow us to ask questions such as: What are the reasons for the structure of the Tudor government's intelligence network? What was its geographical reach and coverage? Can we use network data to show patterns of surveillance? What role did women play in these government networks? And what biases are there in the data?

The authors employ methods from the field of network science, translating key concepts and approaches into a language accessible to literary scholars and historians, and illustrating them with examples drawn from this fantastically rich archive. Each chapter is the product of a set of thematically organized experiments, which show how particular methods can help to ask and answer research questions specific to the State Papers archive, but also have applications for other large bodies of humanities data.

The fundamental aim of this book is not merely to provide an innovative perspective on Tudor politics; it also aspires to introduce an entirely new audience to the methods and applications of network science, and to suggest the suitability of these methods for a range of human endeavors.

Weight: 750g
Dimension: 179 x 254 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198858973