Visualization, mapping, and the history of mobility in the Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews digital methods of scholarship for visualization and mapping, and it then shows how creative and experimental visualization can help us to study the extensive networks that lay behind human mobility, from trade to war, communication, pilgrimage, migration, and much else. In the process, the paper will familiarize historians with the key aspects of digital methods from amalgamating large quantities of data to finding patterns within that data. This discussion of visualization along with the sample maps should demonstrate that digital methods offer a new tool to enhance traditional scholarship and shape richer facts and arguments.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle Ages
• mobility
• spatial history

Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers and the editor for their feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Two examples of such books from the 1970s are National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Fifty States (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1978) and Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, The Anchor Atlas of World History: Volume II From the French Revolution to the American Bicentennial, trans. Ernest A. Menze with maps designed by Harald and Ruth Bukor (New York: Anchor Books, 1978); we discuss several recent digital examples later in the article.

² For a collection of annotated examples of making historical arguments with digital resources and datasets, see Lincoln Mullen and Stephen Robertson’s curated website Models of Argument-Driven Digital History: Arguing with Digital History, Patterns of Historical Interpretation (https://model-articles.rrchnm.org/articles/introduction/) (accessed June 18, 2023).

³ For an excellent survey of various ways to visualize “big data,” see Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscrope (London: Imperial College Press, 2016), especially chapter 5.

⁴ Kevin Kee, “Introduction,” in Kevin Kee, ed., Pastplay: Teaching and Learning History with Technology (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014), 1–3, 14.

⁵ For more on digital tools and methods in the humanities, see David M. Berry, ed., Understanding Digital Humanities (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). For medieval studies in particular, see Laura Morreale and Sean Gilsdorf, eds., Digital Medieval Studies: Practice and Preservation (Leeds: ArcHumanities Press, 2022); and Jennifer E. Boyle and Helen J. Burgess, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Digital Medieval Literature (London: Routledge, 2018).

⁶ A few helpful volumes on spatial history/humanities to start exploring this field are David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds., Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Charles B. Travis, Abstract Machine: Humanities GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2015); Ian N. Gregory and Alistair Geddes, Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS & Spatial History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008); and Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

⁷ Geography has had a huge influence on environmental history and on many modern studies of human interaction with the landscape (even when such work veers toward geographical or environmental determinism – an argument initially used to defend European imperial expansion). The French Annales School, and especially Fernand Braudel, directly credited geography as a source for their expanded view of history, both in context and in its evidence base. See Alan R. H. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16–24; 72–75.

⁸ J.B. Owens and Emery A. Coppola, Jr., “Fuzzy Set Theory (or Fuzzy Logic) to Represent the Messy Data of Complex Human (and other) Systems” (White Paper), https://www.academia.edu/1100044/Fuzzy_Set_Theory_or_Fuzzy_Logic_to_Represent_the_Messy_Data_of_Complex_Human_and_other_Systems (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁹ See David J. Weber, “Bourbons and Bárbaros: Center and Periphery in the Reshaping of Spanish Indian Policy,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 79. For a digital map comparing the lands of native peoples, the regions where specific native languages were spoken, and the territories defined by treaties in the service of conquest see: https://native-land.ca (accessed June 18, 2023).

¹⁰ Palmira Brummett, Mapping the Ottomans: Sovereignty, Territory, and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 127–28.

¹¹ As Mateusz Fafinski pointed out in a viral twitter thread concerning map-based depictions of the opening of the invasion of Ukraine, “every map is a projection of power … beware of maps bearing easy lines.” https://twitter.com/Calthalas/status/1498998318755680260?s=20&t=FtnkRYGOf-sG-mcirSYntQ (accessed June 18, 2023). See, as well, Kyle J. Gardner, The Frontier Complex. Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

¹² For a more thorough discussion of borders, frontiers, and centers in the Middle Ages, particularly the role of castles in creating the frontier in the Frankish Latin Kingdoms, see Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially chapters 9 and 11.

¹³ Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities, 16.

¹⁴ ArcGIS Online see https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-online/overview; QGIS see https://www.qgis.org/en/site/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

¹⁵ Alexander von Lünen and Gunnar Olsson, “‘Thou Shalt Make No Graven Maps!’ An Interview with Gunnar Olsson,” in Alexander von Lünen and Charles Travis, eds., History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections (New York: Springer, 2013), 83.

¹⁶ Humphrey Southall has written a set of articles about these issues in English historical GIS. See, especially, Humphrey Southall, “Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS, Part 1: Building an Indefinitely Scalable Statistical Database,” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (2011): 149–59; and Idem., “Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS, Part 3: Integrating Qualitative Content for a Sense of Place,” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 47, no. 1 (2014): 31–44.

¹⁷ David J. Bodenhamer, “The Spatial Humanities: Space, Time, and Place in the New Digital Age,” in Toni Weller, ed., History in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2013), 28; Many scholars are even more critical. Rita Raley decries quantitative analysis as, “unthinking and its investments in ‘precise measurement’ hopelessly naive; the epistemological certainty that data visualization seems to offer is equally fantastic.” Rita Raley, “Digital Humanities for the Next Five Minutes,” Differences 25, no. 1 (May 1, 2014): 26–45 (on pg. 28), https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391–2419991 (accessed June 18, 2023). The practice of mapping itself was never as positivistic as the harshest criticisms imply, and while computer data systems do demand a precision that is not always available from historical documents, statisticians are just as aware of the ways that this precision is illusory even with contemporary information.

¹⁸ For the Pleiades Project, see: https://pleiades.stoa.org/ (accessed June 18, 2023); for the Spanish gazetteer, see: Robert Hibberd and J.B. Owens, “Before Highway Maps: Creating a Digital Research Infrastructure Based on Sixteenth-Century Iberian Places and Roads,” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 40, no. 1 (2015): Article 2, https://asphs.net/article/before-highway-maps-creating-a-digital-research-infrastructure-based-on-sixteenth-century-iberian-places-and-roads/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

¹⁹ Nicolas Perreaux, “Possibilities, Challenges and Limits of a European Charters Corpus (Cartae Europae Medii Aevi – CEMA),” 2021, hal −03,203,029, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03203029 (accessed June 18, 2023).

²⁰ James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn, “Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A Brief History,” The American Statistician 32, no. 1 (1978): 2–3.

²¹ For COVID-19 maps see https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42489-020-00057-w and http://travelerslab.research.wesleyan.edu/2020/05/12/covid-19-in-nyc-comparison/; for election maps see https://dsl.richmond.edu/voting/elections.html (accessed June 18, 2023).

²² Onno Boonstra, “The Dawn of a Golden Age? Historical GIS and the History of Choropleth Mapping in the Netherlands,” in von Lünen and Travis, History and GIS, 29, 33.

²³ For network visualization for data large or small, Gephy and Cytoscape are appealing places for historians to start. https://gephi.org/; https://cytoscape.org/ (accessed June 18, 2023). One of the early historical uses of network graphs examined marriage patterns and social connections in the Medici family’s rise to power; see John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (May, 1993): 1259–319. For two recent overviews of network analysis and early modern history, see Dan Edelstein, Paula Findlen, Giovanna Ceserani, Caroline Winterer, and Nicole Coleman, “Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project,” The American Historical Review 122, no. 2 (April 2017): 400–24; and Kate Davison, “Early Modern Social Networks: Antecedents, Opportunities, and Challenges,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (April 2019): 456–482. For more on the Mapping the Republic of Letters project see http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

²⁴ For an excellent overview of these issues, see John Theibault, “Visualization and Historical Arguments,” in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, eds., Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 173–85.

²⁵ Detlev Mares and Wolfgang Moschek, “Place in Time: GIS and the Spatial Imagination in Teaching History,” in von Lünen and Travis, History and GIS, 66.

²⁶ See John Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1977).

²⁷ Johanna Drucker, “Non-Representational Approaches to Modeling Interpretation in a Graphical Environment,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33, no. 2 (June 2018): 248–63; and see also Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 125–37.

²⁸ Anne Kelly Knowles, “GIS and History,” in Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2008), 19.

²⁹ While such critiques have long been part of the discussion of maps and mapping, the contemporary debate around maps as purveyors of ideological power has been more central since the publication of J. B. Harvey’s article, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 26, no. 2 (Summer, 1989): 1–20; for other recent critiques along these lines, see Denis Wood with Jon Fels, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 1992); Denis Wood and John Fels, The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Marianna Pavlovskaya and Kevin St. Martin, “Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject,” Geography Compass 1, no. 3 (2007), online: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749–8198.2007.00028.x (accessed June 18, 2023).

³⁰ Levi Westerveld and Anne K. Knowles, “Loosening the Grid: Topology as the Basis for a More Inclusive GIS,” International Journal of Geographic Information Science 35, no. 10 (2021): 2108–27.

³¹ Monica Wachowicz and J.B. Owens, “The Role of Knowledge Spaces in Geographical-Oriented History,” in von Lünen and Travis, History and GIS, 127–44.

³² For Ibn Battuta, see The Travels of Ibn Battuta, at Berkeley University: https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/travels-ibn-battuta; for Marco Polo, see Imagining Medieval Narrative: The Travels of Marco Polo, at Vanderbilt University: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-travels-of-marco-polo/index; or Mapping Polo, by Tomasso Pepe, https://www.mappingpolo.com/; for John Mandeville, see the “Mapping Mandeville Project,” at Historia Cartorum by John Wyatt Greenlee: https://historiacartarum.org/john-mandeville-and-the-hereford-map-2/; though the actual program no longer works, MIT layer-cake visualization of Ibn Juybar’s pilgrimage to Mecca is another strong example of visualization https://libraries.mit.edu/akdc/2017/02/19/akdc-debuts-new-tool-layer-cake/. Chelsea Skalak, “Mapping the Global Middle Ages: Diversifying the Classroom with GIS,” The Once and Future Classroom: Resources for Teaching the Middle Ages 15, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 57–77, https://teams-medieval.org/chelsea-skalak-mapping-the-global-middle-ages-diversifying-the-classroom-with-gis/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

³³ The Claustra project: http://www.ub.edu/claustra/spa/Monestirs/atles (accessed June 18, 2023). An older and thus more well known example is the Mapping Past Societies project at Harvard University (formerly, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Societies) which has digitized the massive Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, https://darmc.harvard.edu/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

³⁴ See Hibberd and Owens, “Before Highway Maps.”

³⁵ In contemporary visualizations, “spatialization” can also refer to the use of non-geographic, but dense or multidimensional data to create spatial “maps” as a particular mode of visualization, see André Skupin and Sara Irina Fabrikant, “Spatialization Methods: A Cartographic Research Agenda for Non-geographic Information Visualization,” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 30, no. 2 (April 2003): 99–119.

³⁶ In our own work, we try to remain agnostic about the specific tools. Data analysis and mapping tools are constantly changing as new systems are developed and expanded. R and Python are data analysis standards for the moment, but we have also made use of other programs such as Recogito’s open-access mapping interface (https://recogito.pelagios.org/) or MAXQDA’s qualitative text analytics (https://www.maxqda.com/) whenever they prove useful (accessed June 9, 2023).

³⁷ For an excellent example of using spatial analysis to reframe the historiographical debate over Frankish segregation vs. Frankish assimilation in the crusader kingdoms, see Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially the maps on pages 223, 226–228, 258, 266–267, 270–271. Ellenblum shows through mapping that Franks largely settled in places with substantial local Christian populations and refrained from living among Muslims and Jews. His spatial analysis indicates a middle ground in the debate by highlighting integration with Eastern Christians and separation from Muslims (251, 282–3, 285).

³⁸ Alexander von Lünen, “Tracking in a New Territory: Re-imaging GIS for History,” in von Lünen and Travis, History and GIS, 232, 235.

³⁹ https://travelerslab.research.wesleyan.edu/theophanes/ (accessed June 18, 2023). On the text itself, see the critical edition by Karl de Boor, Theophanis Chronographia (Leipzig: Teubner, 1883), the critical translation by Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and the recent critical study by Jesse W. Torgerson, The Chronographia of George the Synkellos and Theophanes: the Ends of Time in Ninth-Century Constantinople (Leiden: Brill, 2022).

⁴⁰ This ratio was determined by reading quickly through the Chronicle and using the qualitative analysis tool MaxQDA (https://www.maxqda.com/) to highlight sentences that had a significant focus on where something happened rather than on what happened or the character of the persons involved and other such editorializing commentary.

⁴¹ Data publicly available here: https://github.com/The-Travelers-Lab/Theophanes-Geography-Project/blob/master/Datasets/Years_Place_Settlements%20(wide%20version).csv (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁴² “Mentions” were tallied manually rather than with a text-search function in order to be able to tally not only explicit namings of settlements (“Constantinople”) but also the use of demonstratives to refer to specific locations (“there,” “that city,” etc.). This work was performed by lab members Ethan Yaro and Nathan Krieger and checked by Jesse W. Torgerson.

⁴³ For earlier work with hand-drawn maps, see Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, Los caminos en la historia de España (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1951). For more on the creation of the digital road map from Villuga, see Hibberd and Owens, “Before Highway Maps.” Of course, the number of miles or kilometers that constituted a league was not standard in the early modern period, which raises further questions about mapping and distance based on itineraries. See Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Peripheries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 96–100.

⁴⁴ The Viabundus Pre-Modern Street Map, (https://www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstrassen/index.php) (accessed June 18, 2023), a more recent project, also uses reported trips, but instead of coming from a single work like the Villuga itinerary, the dataset is an aggregate of hundreds of small references to single trips taken by merchants, couriers, or other local travelers, especially among the many towns and cities in the network of the Hanseatic League. The original data for the project come from the 1962 atlas, the Hansische Handelsstraßen, but the project collaborators are continually adding new data. Like the digital Villuga project with its data points certainty rating, the Viabundus dataset indicates levels of certainty for all elements. This is especially important because some of the roads are reconstructed using likely routes and even LIDAR data to guess at likely historical paths that are only attested to in single sources. Moreover, as Paddington Hodza and Kurtis Butler have shown for Roman roads in Italy, any attempt to extrapolate a more “real” path from the incomplete archeological record for ancient transportation routes remains an interpretation. As noted in part one, the perceived precision of GIS can conceal these interpretations. Therefore, it is important to highlight such choices in our datasets and maintain good metadata embedded in the map so the interpretive choices can be evaluated. Paddington Hodza and Kurtis A. Butler, “Juxtaposing GIS and Archaeologically Mapped Ancient Road Routes,” Geographies 2 (2022): 48–67, https://www.mdpi.com/2673–7086/2/1/5 (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁴⁵ Federico Pablo-Martí, Ángel Alañón-Pardo, and Angel Sánchez, “Complex Networks to Understand the Past: The Case of Roads in Bourbon Spain,” Cliometrica (October 2020), see fig. 6, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-020-00218-x (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁴⁶ Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 282.

⁴⁷ For an attempt to study communication costs along the main routes of the Roman Empire (including at different times of the year), see the innovative Orbis project at Stanford University. https://orbis.stanford.edu/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁴⁸ Braudel, Mediterranean, 358–59.

⁴⁹ Pascual Martínez Sopena, “El Camino de Santiago y la articulación del espacio Hispánico,” in Javier García Turza, ed., El Camino de Santiago y la sociedad medieval (Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2000), 71 n.19; For horses, see https://horseracingsense.com/how-far-can-a-horse-travel-in-a-day/ (accessed June 18, 2023). As a point of comparison, in 1993, Charles Blackmore’s expedition through the Taklamakan leg of the Silk Road with camels covered 780 miles in 59 days, averaging just over 13 miles a day. See Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9–10.

⁵⁰ Menéndez Pidal, Los caminos en la historia de España.

⁵¹ Braudel, Mediterranean, 279.

⁵² For an innovative study that uses 85 itineraries to examine early modern European connections between cities, see Rachel Midura, “Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545–1700,” Journal of Social History 54, no. 4 (2021): 1023–63.

⁵³ The Viabundus project is described above in footnote 44; the Mercator-e project is run by Pau de Soto at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Daniel Alves at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; see http://fabricadesites.fcsh.unl.pt/mercator-e/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁵⁴ The itinerary was created and published using the dense documentation from the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, published by Juan Manuel del Estal, Itinerario de Jaime II de Aragon (1291–1327) (Zaragoza: Institución «Fernando el Católico» C.S.I.C, 2009); available online: https://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/28/86/_ebook.pdf (accessed June 18, 2023); Thomas Nuhfer and Alex O’Pray assisted in translating del Estal’s research into the data used for the map while they were students at Marlboro College.

⁵⁵ Antoni Riera Melis, “La red viaria de la Corona Catalanoaragonesa en la baja edad media,” Acta Historica et Archaeologica Mediaevalia 23–24 (2002): 454–55; For more on the ancient Roman road network in Iberia see, Viator-e, a current digital project seeking to compile the road networks in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. https://viatore.icac.cat/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁵⁶ Riera Melis, “La red viaria,” 462–3; these findings also broadly agree with the visualizations produced by Mercator-e, see http://fabricadesites.fcsh.unl.pt/mercator-e/results-2/medieval-roads/ (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁵⁷ This work has been especially important in research on earlier medieval kings; see John Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c. 936–1075 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Rosamond McKitterick, “A King On The Move: The Place of an Itinerant Court in Charlemagne’s Government,” in Jeroen Duindam, Tülay Artan, and Metin Kunt, eds., Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 145–69.

⁵⁸ David Alonso García, “Corte, red viaria y sistemas de comunicaciones en la España de Carlos V,” in Ludolf Pelizaeus, ed., Les villes de Habsbourg du XV^e au XIX^e siècle: Communication, art et pouvoir dans les réseaux urbains (Reims: ÉPURE, 2021).

⁵⁹ See https://www.fundacioncajacirculo.es/AHCB_D.php?cod=7040RR&nombre=Limosna (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁶⁰ Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale, “The Medieval Pilgrimage Business,” Enterprise and Society 12, no. 3 (September 2011): 601–24.

⁶¹ Buffer tools are a feature in GIS programs that create polygons based on a set distance from a point, line, or polygon. Buffers are useful for proximity analysis to determine whether features fall inside or outside the buffer or to determine the mean distances from a single point. For example, how many monasteries are within five miles of the Camino (above) or how many monasteries are within a series of 20 mile intervals of a central point (below). For a more thorough discussion of the use of buffers in historical research, see Gregory and Ell, Historical GIS, 76–79.

⁶² The monastery layer was created from two sources. Archival documents regarding monasteries that contributed to the ecclesiastical subsidy in the early sixteenth century and data culled from a gazetteer. See Archivo General de Simancas, Comisaría de Cruzada, legajos 1–5, and Annie Shaver-Crandell and Paula Gerson, with the assistance of Alison Stones, The Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Gazetteer (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1995). The following Saint Anselm College students helped to develop the Camino dataset and maps: Emma Bickford, Brodie Deshaies, Madison Lessard, Katherine Menice, Claire Ridley, and Audrey Wetjen.

⁶³ For more on the infrastructure of the Camino, see Sean T. Perrone and Carol Traynor, “Mapping the Way of St. James: GIS Technology, Spatial History, and the Middle Ages,” Church History and Religious Culture 101 (2021): 3–32 and for various layers of the infrastructure see https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=686ab9f3f4924c1ab3ce68e40744b73d (accessed June 18, 2023).

⁶⁴ The list of houses was derived mainly from David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, England and Wales, revised edition (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1972). Houses that went out of existence might still be represented in our maps. Additional verification of houses relied sometimes on the Victoria County Histories of England; and David M. Smith and Vera C.M. London, eds., The Heads of Religious Houses, England and Wales, vol. II, 1216–1377 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For chapter locations, see H.E. Salter, Chapters of Augustinian Canons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922).

⁶⁵ Amelia Kennedy, “‘Do Not Relinquish Your Offspring:’ Changing Cistercian Attitudes Toward Older Abbots and Abbatial Retirement in High Medieval Europe,” Radical History Review 139 (2021): 133–35.

⁶⁶ Saturnino Ruiz de Loizaga, Camino de Santiago: Fuentes Documentales Vaticanas referentes al noroeste Peninsular (siglos xiv-xv) (Burgos: Rico Adrados, S.L., 2017), 121.

⁶⁷ For further information on his life, see R. M. Haines, The Church and Politics in Fourteenth-Century England: The Career of Adam Orleton, c. 1275–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

⁷⁰ The entire letter collection is currently digitized through the archive’s website. The map and project described here use the metadata connected to each letter to look at the large-scale patterns of frequency or delivery speed. The metadata for the majority of the letters includes the origin and destination, along with the dates of origin and delivery; see: http://datini.archiviodistato.prato.it/carteggi/ (accessed June 18, 2023); Pavel Oleinikov, the assistant director of the Quantitative Analysis Center at Wesleyan University, assisted in preparing the metadata to use with QGIS; Logan Davis, a student at Marlboro College, assisted with the initial analysis, including identifying all the cities involved in the letter communications.

⁷¹ Frederigo Melis, “Intensità e regolarità nella diffusione dell’informazione economica generale nel Mediterraneo e in Occidente alla fine del Medioevo,” in Histoire économique du monde méditerranéen, 1450–1650, Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 1973), 389–424; this particular work opts for large charts of numbers rather than maps, but the intent is clearly spatial.

⁷² For more on visual analysis of financial networks in the early modern period, see Ana Sofia Ribeiro, Early Modern Trading Networks in Europe: Cooperation and the Case of Simón Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Amélia Polonia, Sara Pinto, and Ana Ribeiro, “Trade Networks in the First Global Age: The Case Study of Simón Ruiz Company: Visualization Methods and Spatial Projections,” in Ana Crespo Solana, ed., Spatio-Temporal Narratives: Historical GIS and the Study of Global Trading Networks (1500–1800) (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

⁷³ Peter Hugill, World Trade since 1431: Geography, Technology, and Capitalism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), 48–51; an analysis of transaction costs in Hamburg by Oliver Volckart showed that not only were ships not cost effective, but the city often preferred individual runners even to horses as the best form of communication; see “The influence of information costs on the integration of financial markets: Northern Europe, 1350–1560,” SFB 649 Discussion Paper, No. 2006,049, Humboldt University of Berlin, Collaborative Research Center 649 - Economic Risk, Berlin (2006), 28–29.

⁷⁴ Juraj Kittler, “Caught between Business, War and Politics: Late Medieval Roots of the Early Modern European News Networks,” Mediterranean Historical Review 33, no. 2 (2018): 204–05; Jong Kuk Nam, “The Scarsella between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in the 1400’s,” Mediterranean Review 9, no. 1 (2016): 53–75; and Don Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries: German Merchants and Commerce in Golden Age Antwerp (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 41, 45–46, and 58.

⁷⁵ Traveler’s Lab at Wesleyan University http://travelerslab.research.wesleyan.edu (accessed May 6, 2023).

⁷⁶ Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments,” 174–75.

⁷⁷ For more on Big Data, see Viktor Mayer-Schönberg and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Mariner Books, 2013), 35–36, 45–48, and 191.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sean T. Perrone

Sean T. Perrone is Professor of History at Saint Anselm College. He holds a BA in History from Rutgers University and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Adam Franklin-Lyons

Adam Franklin-Lyons is Associate Professor of History at the Marlboro Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emerson College. He holds a BA in Philosophy and a BM in Musicology from Oberlin College, an MA in Religion, and a PhD in History from Yale University.

David Gary Shaw

David Gary Shaw is Professor of History at Wesleyan University. He received his BA from McGill University in history and philosophy and a doctorate from Oxford University. He is an associate editor of the journal History & Theory.

Jesse W. Torgerson

Jesse W. Torgerson is Associate Professor of Letters and the Director of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. He holds a BA from Biola University, and an MA and PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.