GENDERED NETWORKS AND COMMUNICABILITY IN MEDIEVAL HISTORICAL NARRATIVES

S. D. Prado, S. R. Dahmen, A. L. C. Bazzan, M. Maccarron and J. Hillner
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S. D. Prado: Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegr 91501-970, Brazil
S. R. Dahmen: Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegr 91501-970, Brazil
A. L. C. Bazzan: Instituto de Informática, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre 91501-970, Brazil
M. Maccarron: Department of Digital Humanities, University College Cork, Cork T12 YN60, Ireland
J. Hillner: Department of History, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7RA, UK

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2020, vol. 23, issue 03, 1-22

Abstract: Since the 1970s, scholars have begun to pay attention to the presentation of women in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the main source for the early history of Britain (from the first century BC to the eighth century AD). Vastly different conclusions have been drawn, ranging from positivist approaches which saw the period as a golden age for women to rather more negative assessments, which argue that Bede suppressed the role of women. By analyzing the concept of communicability and relevance of certain nodes in complex networks, we show how Bede’s Ecclesiastical History affords women complex and nuanced social roles. In particular, we can show the independent importance of certain abbesses, which is a significant result and challenges much of the existing scholarship on Bede’s attitude to female power.

Keywords: Gendered networks; communicability; node relevance; medieval history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1142/S021952592050006X

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