Tudor Networks of Power

By Ruth Ahnert & Sebastian E. Ahnert 

Oxford University Press 2024

The brief biography of Ruth Ahnert appended to Tudor Networks of Power raises no eyebrows: Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, with a focus on Tudor culture. Straightforward enough, but then there’s her co-author, Sebastian Ahnert: University Lecturer at the Department of Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London — surely the first work of Tudor history with an author sporting such credentials. When the Society for Creative Anachronism is elbowed aside in favor of chemical engineering, any reader of Tudor history can rightly wonder why.

The explanation harks back to 2008, when the British government’s State Papers were digitized. This meant that not only were 132,747 documents of all kinds now searchable in ways and with an ease that would have been the envy and the dream of centuries of scholars, but also that what had been a vast repository of documents now became something undreamt of by those long-gone historians: a dataset. 

Enter the discipline of network science. Enter the data wonks.

Searchable now are quantities and information streams quite raw of human interpretation. “Never before has anyone had such full, complete, and correct information about the entire epistolary holdings of the Tudor State Papers archive,” the authors write. In these pages, they proceed to chart exactly what the data actually indicates.

Readers of Tudor history will be able to predict some of the biggest  … I suppose we must call them ‘nodes’  … of that data. Upon his sudden downfall, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s voluminous papers were confiscated; upon his sudden downfall, Wolsey’s protege Thomas Cromwell’s hoard of papers was likewise confiscated. William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham, were corresponding paper-amassers in the reign of Elizabeth I. Great piles of these papers somehow managed to avoid fire, flood, and mice; they and much other data-traffic during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I, when digitally sifted, show who was writing to whom, about what, how often, and, of curious interest, who wrote back. “Given the social pressure of reciprocity,” the authors write, “we can safely assume that the majority of letters sent to and from the Tudor government — with the exception of petitions and certain news bulletins from agents posted abroad, especially military reports — would receive a reply.” 

What emerges are certain select profiles, names that crop up more often in dataset analysis than they’ve ever done in narrative Tudor histories. When Henry VIII was pushing hard for justification to set aside his rightful queen and marry Anne Boleyn, for instance, he made furious use of a scholar named Richard Croke, who was enthusiastically authorized to search out any books or documents that might support the king’s cause. This made him a standout profile, with a fingerprint that radiates outward to a wide array of figures, from the bishops of London and Hereford to Stephen Gardiner, William Fitzwilliam, Thomas Cranmer, and of course Henry himself. Figures like Croke, suddenly thrust into the informational spotlight, encourages our authors to indulge themselves:

The concept of the network profile or fingerprint is that it allows us to measure in eight-dimensional space the people most similar across these metrics. There are two separate ways we can compute this. Our first approach calculates a fingerprint for a given individual by considering their ranks for the eight metrics and taking the logarithm of each. 

That alarming mention of eight-dimensional space is only the beginning. By the time these authors are done with their hardiest readers, they’ll be familiar with all kinds of Turing-style lingo, from “total degree” to out degree, in-degree, total strength, out-strength, in-strength, betweenness, and, saints preserve us, eigenvector centrality. This study of a huge Tudor dataset is much heavier on the dataset part than it is on the Tudor part. 

The authors repeatedly point out that it’s not their aim to draw conclusions. Their book feels more like a scientific demonstration than a catalogue raisonné. On the one hand, Tudor Networks of Power is in many ways the most remarkable work of Tudor analysis ever done, the kind of thing that feels groundbreaking in ways that are at present unclear. But on the other hand, Richard Croke might have been a busy correspondent, but he’s nevertheless inconsequential, as are other figures from these pages, like Jane, the Duchess of Feria. 

The resulting reading satisfaction is an oddly disjointed thing. Thanks to this protracted exercise in network analysis, the book is full of information but almost empty of insight. It’s charts (again, like nothing ever seen in a work of Tudor history) show spiderwebs of connections, but almost no meanings. The faint traceworks caught on these pages, of letters flying in all directions, is fascinating and oddly evocative. But even so, it’s difficult to imagine what use future Tudor historians will make of all this. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News