SCSC 2016 (August 1820), Bruges

Visualizing the Early Modern World in Digital Space and Time

Bound by Books
Exploring the network of the Florentine bibliophile Antonio Magliabechi.
By Ingeborg van Vugt

With this contribution, I would like to discuss how multi-layered visualizations of epistolary
networks can contribute to a greater understanding of the circulation of illegal literature and ideas
between Catholic Tuscany and the Calvinist Dutch Republic. If we wish to understand how
scholars and booksellers were able to overcome these confessional barriers a network study of
epistolary exchanges provides a very interesting addition to archival research. This study is based
on the assumption that full data integration, in particular when dealing with early modern
correspondences, is impossible for reasons of incompleteness, complexity and uncertainty in data.
Therefore the focus should not be on analytical and statistical methods of network representations
alone, but on approaches that allows us to handle, inquire and interpret these complex historical
data. We do not need just networks as static representations, but also networks as interactive
interfaces. To this end I will discuss a visualization of the epistolary network of the open minded
Florentine bibliophile Antonio Magliabechi (1633-1714). The representation of his
correspondences over time and space, in which both persons and books constitute the nodes,
provides very interesting angles to understand how knowledge circulated in Early Modern Europe.