# Net Work: Then and Now
### MLA 2018, Friday January 5th 3:30-4:45, Sheraton Riverside Ballroom, sponsored by LLC 17th-Century English

**Panelists**: [Hillary Nunn (Akron) and Melissa Schultheis (Rutgers)](#1-using-the-methods-of-our-manuscripts-networking-and-early-modern-recipe-collaborations), [Jonathan Lamb (Kansas)](#2-the-ifs-ands-and-buts-of-early-modern-england), [Christopher D’Addario (Gettysburg)](#3-early-modern-echo-chambers-the-quotidian-networks-of-civil-war-london), [Mattie Burkert (Utah State)](#4-financial-and-professional-networks-in-the-restoration-theater)

**Chair**: Christopher Warren (Carnegie Mellon)

**Keywords**: networks, digital humanities, manuscript studies, theater history, public sphere

**Hashtags**: #MLA18, #s365, #net_work

[**Paper Titles and Abstracts**](#paper-titles-and-abstracts)

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| Athanasius Kircher's hypothesized system of subterranean canals of fire connecting the world's volcanoes. Source: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3201c.ct000234/)|

## **Paper Titles and Abstracts**

### **1.) Using the Methods of Our Manuscripts: Networking and Early Modern Recipe Collaborations**
Hillary Nunn (Akron) and Melissa Schultheis (Rutgers)

The Wellcome Library manuscript MS 7113 epitomizes the promise of working with recipe books to reconstruct early modern social networks. Owned by Lady Anne Fanshawe and later inherited by her daughter, MS 7113 shows the effects of marriages, politics, and social upheavals on early modern domestic life, and its yet-unstudied marginal notations and recipes written in English and Spanish bear the influence of Lady Anne’s travels to France, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. As these notations often indicate who donated recipes to the household and as particular dishes such as “seviche” and “Spanish Bacon” specify recipe and ingredient location, MS 7113 hints at both the social networks within which the Fanshawes operated as well as the way English households engaged with foreign cookery and medicine.

This presentation will trace intersections between Lady Anne’s travels and recipe collecting habits while also demonstrating how today's collaborative methods are bringing to light the networks that created early modern manuscript recipe collections. Taking MS 7113 as our model, we will also show how collaborations like The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective and the Herbal History Research Network allow scholars from disparate campuses to map similarly long-distance relationships that influence domestic practice.

### **2.) The Ifs, Ands, and Buts of Early Modern England**
Jonathan Lamb (Kansas)

In this paper, I argue that the problems of network analysis need philological answers. As the study of networks has expanded over the last decade, one central question has been how to comprehend at once (1) associations as they occur and (2) their change over time. We seem to be confronting a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of networks: we can render a network, and we can study shifting patterns, but it’s incredibly difficult to do both at once. At the same time, attempts to address this problem have been inflected by the question of whether “the social” is one of a bundle of cultural threads or, as Bruno Latour argues, the principle by which the bundles become possible. We therefore confront a twin set of problems: how to study networks over time, and what we would be studying if we could.

This paper will consider the very words that forge associations: conjunctions. Applying computational techniques to the EEBO-TCP and then cross-referencing those data with the DNB and the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project, I will address the early modern English associational networks that accrued, over time, around different forms of relation: if (a conditional relation), and (a conjunctive relation), and but (along with not, a disjunctive).

### **3.) Early Modern Echo Chambers? The Quotidian Networks of Civil War London**
Christopher D’Addario (Gettysburg)

The English Civil War transformed the city of London in profound ways. Beyond changes to the architectural landscape, such as the destruction of the theaters, and to the urban population, with the return of English exiles to the city, there was also a distinct and noticeable shift in the atmosphere of public spaces. The 1640s saw the flooding of taverns with printed materials, a nearly continuous stream of protestors and speakers in the streets, and the repurposing of city spaces for the voluntary gatherings of like-minded individuals.

This paper will examine closely these quotidian realities of Civil War London in an effort to understand how these transformations impacted the political, religious, and cultural networks formed by Londoners during this time of war. How did geographic proximity, modes of print distribution, and the disturbances to quotidian routine that war brought, inflect and influence communal association at a moment when ideologies and beliefs were shifting and expanding rapidly? After the decline in religious persecution in 1640, there was a sharp rise in voluntary “gathered” churches, churches that also served as important nodes for the dissemination of oppositional political and religious ideas. The mid-century also brought the increase in developments clustered around closes and narrow blind alleys, and thus the increase in micro-neighborhoods. In looking at these developments, I seek to query the broader historical narrative of the development of an open early modern public sphere during these years, suggesting the high potential for these networks to reinforce ideology and belief systems at a local level.

### **4.) Financial and Professional Networks in the Restoration Theater**
Mattie Burkert (Utah State)

The early modern London theater was a commercial enterprise, never imagined as standing above or apart from the market. From the earliest days of the permanent playhouses, acting companies were structured much like joint-stock trading enterprises, with shares and shareholders. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the official duopoly granted to William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew enabled the development of a secondary securities market around the royal patents and their associated property rights. As a result, the late-seventeenth-century theater became a kind of laboratory in which innovations from the world of finance were tested out, allowing Londoners to explore and debate questions of value, abstraction, speculation, and risk that were reshaping the economy as a whole. This paper presents an ongoing effort to map the financial networks surrounding the London theaters after 1660, using computational network analysis to represent relationships of investment and patronage and to explore how they were connected to writing, acting, and publishing. The network analysis draws on data recently recovered from a 1970s database of recorded performances in London 1660 to 1800, which includes cast lists, theater locations, ticket prices, and other information about the financial and professional networks of the Restoration theater.