I chose to do a dataset taking place in England from the years 1642-1651. This is the range of dates that the English civil war took place. I decided on this as I thought it would be an interesting time period to look at. How does upheaval affect letter writing? I was specifically curious if it would make communication harder. There was a good amount of data within this period, but not a particularly high amount. I thought looking into this dataset would be interesting because it would show the direct impact on correspondents at such a tumultuous time. I think this could especially the role women played during this time period and how it changed or did not change based on the war going on.

The visualization of my dataset does show that women played an integral part to the Republic of Letters. As we can see specifically in my case the women are mostly the ones being written to. We discussed in class that women during this period had salons and would host intellectuals of the time period to come and collaborate/discuss their ideas. So it makes sense that people would be writing to women either to talk about a wide range of topics and or request to go to these salons to bring up their ideas. We also see plenty of women writing to each other as well as writing to men. This is likely due to the post office being established in the years prior so communication via posted letters was just generally becoming more standard.

I also find it likely that there was an element of people writing to one another due to possible separation during war times. Men writing to women could also be a sign of them being away and having a desire to communicate with people who were far away. No matter the reason these correspondents were taking place, this data shows that women were not just orbiting the Republic of Letters but directly involved. In my dataset specifically there are more women than men present. So we can reason that they were central to this period of time.

I would say this kind of visualization helps us reason where people were during this time period specifically their state of mind. What drove them to find a need for this form of communication? I think being able to go back and see the correlations and connections people had with each other makes it that much easier to understand this question. Letter writing definitely played a major role in the formation and collection of certain intellectual ideas. Especially because it was just easier to get one’s thoughts in order and communicate with like minded people so they could build and build up on these kinds of ideas.

The datasets underlying this network analysis were generated through searches of the Early Modern Letters Online database. View the dataset on men corresponding with women as a CSV here; on women corresponding with men as a CSV here; and women corresponding with women as a CSV here.