Amy Nelson Burnett: What Social Network Analysis Can Tell Us About German Humanism

Letters were a vital means of communication for Germany’s learned elite in the early sixteenth century. Although scholars have long studied the published correspondence of individual German humanists, they have paid little attention to the metadata that provides a larger overview of the network created by those letters. My presentation will describe the shape of that correspondence network on the eve of the Reformation, using social network analysis to trace the flow of news, information, and ideas and to identify significant attributes of network members that helped shape group identity.  

This seminar is cosponsored by Religious Studies, History, and CMEMS.

The presentation will include lunch and take place at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A. A Zoom link is available upon request.

About the Presenter

Amy Nelson Burnett is Paula and D.B. Varner University Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research examines the dissemination of the Reformation in south Germany and Switzerland through print, preaching, and educational reform, and she is now using a database of early modern correspondence to analyze the connections between German humanism and the early Reformation. She is the author of Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation (2019) and Karlstadt and the Origins of the Eucharistic Controversy: A Study in the Circulation of Ideas (2011), and co-editor of A Companion to the Swiss Reformation (2016). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities.