Social Network Analysis (Medieval Studies)

This paper argues that there was a decline in episcopal authority in Parma during the Investiture Contest and that this was caused primarily by a series of absences of the bishops of the city. This is at odds with the dominant historiographical view which presents the bishops of Parma as the dominant force in the county and diocese until the episcopate of the Gregorian Bernard degli Uberti at the start of the twelfth century. Bernard is traditionally presented as arriving in the city with the intent to remove himself and the bishopric of Parma from the secular world, adhering to Gregorian principles. I argue that this was not the case and that Bernard handed power over to the proto-commune unwillingly.
Moreover, I will argue that Bernard’s episcopate was not a sudden loss of power but instead that the role of the bishop in secular matters had been diminishing since the episcopate of Cadalus starting in the 1040s and this was increasingly apparent during the episcopates of Everard and Wido. The types of absence of Cadalus, Everard and Wido from Parma varied but in every case the crcumstances and manner of their rule removed them from their role as bishop.

Graph 1: The network of correspondence of Metropolitan Michael Choniates of Athens in the years 1182-1204 in geographical space; lines are scaled according to the number of letters sent by Michael to the respective locality (with the exception of Constantinople, which is the destination of 71 % of all letters). The geographical dimension of the social network of Michael becomes visible; it still focused on the centres of Byzantine political and ecclesiastical power and cultural activity in Constantinople and Thessalonike, dwarfing the amount of correspondence within his Greek diocese (Graph by J. Preiser-Kapeller, 2013; data from: Michaeli Choniatae Epistulae, rec. Foteini Kolovou [CFHB XLI]. Berlin 2001).

Graph 2: Fig. 2a: The network of correspondence of Metropolitan Michael Choniates of Athens in the years 1205-1222 in geographical space; lines are scaled according to the number of letters sent by Michael to the respective locality. The conquest of Athens by the Crusaders in 1204 forced Michael to seek exile on the island of Keos; from there, despite Latin rule he attempted to stay in intensive contact with friends and supporters within his former diocese on the mainland. At the same time, his more far reaching contacts were re-oriented towards the new centres of Byzantine power and culture in exile in Western Asia Minor (Nikaia) and Western Greece (Arta and Naupaktos). The contacts to the now Latin ruled territories in and around Constantinople on the contrast are very sparse. (Graph by J. Preiser-Kapeller, 2013; data from: Michaeli Choniatae Epistulae, rec. Foteini Kolovou [CFHB XLI]. Berlin 2001).

Presentation for the Conference "Linking the Mediterranean:
Regional and Trans-Regional Interactions in Times of Fragmentation (300 -800 CE) " (see: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/byzanz/pdf/Linking_Program.pdf).
For the full paper „Peaches to Samarkand. Long distance-connectivity, small worlds and socio-cultural dynamics across Afro-Eurasia, 300-800 CE”, see: https://www.academia.edu/9461845/Peaches_to_Samarkand._Long_distance-connectivity_small_worlds_and_socio-cultural_dynamics_across_Eurasia_300-800_CE

"In their influential paper on „Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency“, Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin stated in 1994: “despite its powerful conceptualization of social structure, network analysis as it has been developed to date has inadequately theorized the causal role of ideals, beliefs, and values, and of the actors that strive to realize them; as a result, it has neglected the cultural and symbolic moment in the very determination of social action.”  Although meanwhile various theoretical concepts and models of “relational sociology” have been developed , the cultural dimension is still underrepresented in many works of quantitatively oriented social and also historical network analysis.
In this paper, I will present the explanatory value of these relational approaches to social reality for historical research and their combination with quantitative network analysis; for various case studies, the actual interplay between the structural and the cultural dimension of social, religious, economic, political or intellectual linkages between individuals, groups or communities will be demonstrated.  Firstly, it will be demonstrated that basic decisions on the selection of nodes and the definition of ties in (historical) quantitative networks models are always based on explicit or implicit considerations of the qualitative aspects of these elements. The remarkable agreement of the approaches of R. H. Atkin (1974, 1977) respectively Borgatti et. al. (2009), W. Reinhard (2006) and Cl. Lemercier (2012) for the categorisation of relationships in networks will be discussed and exemplified. Secondly, I will argue for the relevance of concepts of relational sociology and of recent attempts to combine it with Luhmann´s System theory for historical network research. And finally, the claim of Emirbayer and Goodwin that “cultural discourses, narratives, and idioms are (…) analytically autonomous”  will be discussed with regard to the possibility and limitations of analysing these phenomena with the help of network analytical concepts and tools. As a result, the necessity to follow the relational approach in order to understand the complexity of pre-modern societies shall become evident.
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