Networks of Book Makers, Owners and Users in Late Medieval England

The Book-Networks Project is part of a cluster of projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation at the University of Toronto. The aim of all the projects is to use existing digital technologies and to create or refine new technological approaches to enable an exploration of the lives of book-owning individuals, the institutions they served and the communities to which they belonged in both the medieval and the early modern periods.

This project uses network visualisation to create a dynamic interface linking specific manuscripts with patrons, scribes, owners, places and organisations. Such links may allow us to situate a manuscript or document in a rough time-period, to see personal connections between the families and colleagues of the scribe or patron, to contextualise the creation of the written artefact whether by location or within a specific interest group and from that to attempt to map the progress of ideas, whether religious, political or literary