Tuesday 11 March 2025 – Julia King (Lambeth Palace Library): Syon and Sion: Women’s Reading and Community as a Model for Bibliographic Network Analysis

This seminar is 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm GMT in Room N304, Institute of Historical Research. The IHR is in the North block of Senate House, University of London (Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU). You can also join online via Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/93489816560.

Session chair: TBC

Abstract: Using the examples of the provenance networks of the medieval Syon Abbey sisters (1415-1539) and the earliest women donors to Sion College (1630-1710), this paper will discuss the capabilities and limitations of network analysis for bibliographic provenance networks. Network analysis has remarkable strengths when it comes to examining donor networks, as will be discussed in the context of the author’s recent article “Syon Abbey’s Books and the Strength of Weak Ties” (Manuscript Studies 9.1, 2024). However, the practical requirements of structuring networks for analysis mean that researchers are faced with significant data curation challenges, such as the one mode/two mode problem, which makes it difficult to create networks of both people in a network and the books they owned and passed on. Other challenges stem from the nature of medieval/early modern data itself, such as the relatively small size of extant datasets and the difficulty of reconciling networks made up of both manuscripts and early printed books, which do not have consistent bibliographic metadata. Using lessons learned from the Syon Abbey project, this paper will conclude by discussing the choices made when creating a new bibliographic network from a different dataset constructed from early modern Sion College’s newly digitised Book of Benefactors (no relation) and point to the potential for a model of bibliographic network analysis that might be applicable to a variety of datasets.

Bio: Dr Julia King is Rare Books Librarian at Lambeth Palace Library, where she curates the Library’s collection of pre-1850 imprints and other special collections. She is the curator of the recent exhibition ‘”Her Booke”: Early Modern Women and their Books at Lambeth Palace Library”. Her current research is on the application of network analysis to medieval and early modern women’s reading communities, most notably the library of the sisters of medieval Syon Abbey, England’s first and only Birgittine monastery.