Possibly because I am currently watching Hulu’s The Great, a fictionalized retelling of Catherine of Russia’s early reign, possibly because I thoroughly enjoy the thought of a woman leading an enormous country and making changes, but either way for this assignment I decided to look into the letters that Catherine the Great sent back and forth, specifically to Paris, in order to look at the different types of information and ideas that she was exchanging with enlightened thinkers that she had experienced previously.

Historically speaking, Catherine the Great is referred to as such because she made sweeping changes to Russia and its infrastructure by freeing the indentured servitude class, the serfs, in addition to prioritizing arts, philosophy, and literature among the upper classes. She brought in a slew of enlightenment ideals to the far East reaches of her territory, effectively bringing Russia into the same modern times as the rest of Western Europe.

Since we were looking at the Republic of Letters, specifically those written by women, then what better woman than one of the most powerful in the history of the Russian monarchy?

I wanted to focus on the letters that she sent and received from France, where she had a lot of close relationships with French philosophers, whose work she greatly admired.

Obviously, I couldn’t analyze each and every letter that the Empress of Russia wrote. For one thing, there’s too many to count, but for another there was no examining what the contents would be. Since I focused on the letters to and from France, specifically Paris, in order to see if she was keeping in close contact with just one or two philosophers, or if she was broadening her horizons.

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

Clearly, she was writing a lot. However, Catherine only wrote to a handful of people in France, but it seems to be at least once a year for almost her entire reign. There were two men in France she routinely wrote to, and one woman, as far as the data tells us. They were writing her back with equal enthusiasm and in great numbers as well. But, who can honestly think of someone who doesn’t want to be pen pals with the Empress?

This visualization shows less about women in general and more about one woman in particular, a woman in power. I thought that this case study would be more impactful when considering the literacy of the country she was trying to govern, as well as the ideals that she was trying to incorporate. I’d liken it to Anna Maria von Schurman, as discussed in one of the readings, in that she too organized a deep and complex discussion of ideals and philosophies from a remote location, just like Catherine.

When thinking about what this specifically shows us as historians and scholars, we need to think about what is not there first. Obviously, there are many letters and otherwise that have been lost to time and destruction, or even from lack of preservation, but those that were, were deemed important. This tells us about what level of social class and the depth of social status that was thought of with the seemingly “ordinary” men versus the higher class women.

Overall, this was quite an interesting visualization to look at, and illuminates the importance of literacy, philosophy, and how women had a clearly important, yet hidden, role in the Republic of Letters.