Imaginative Networks: Tracing Connections Among Early Modern Book Dedications

Abstract

This essay uses network metrics (centrality, density, clustering coefficients) to account for shifts in dedicatory practice resulting from political crises, religious turmoil, and changes in book production practices. It constructs a network from the names that appear in dedications of EEBO­TCP texts; names are detected using the linguistic markup from the EarlyPrint project. The essay argues that we learn more about early modern book history by constructing networks of all the names that appear in dedications, not just those of authors, printers, and patrons. The network includes a mixture of religious and political figures, literary personalities, fictional characters, and bookmaking professionals, because this is the full range of names that dedicatory practice covers in the period. By proceeding in this way, network metrics can account for a range of dedicatory phenomena, including Queen Elizabeth’s popularity on both sides of the political aisle long after her death and, especially, consolidation around non­contemporary names in dedicatory practice as a result of both the Civil War and the Restoration. The imaginative networks revealed by early modern dedications are organized mainly around untimely figures from the recent and distant past, but despite this the networks are sensitive to historical change, especially at moments of political and social crisis.