Tudor Networks Of Power

Tudor Networks of Power is the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between an early modern book historian and a physicist specializing in complex networks. Together they have reconstructed and computationally analysed the networks of intelligence, diplomacy, and political influence across a century of Tudor history (1509-1603), based on the British State Papers. The 130,000 letters that survive in the State Papers from the Tudor period provide crucial information about the textual organization of the social network centred on the Tudor government. Whole libraries have been written using this archive, but until now nobody has had access to the macroscopic tools that allow us to ask questions such as: What are the reasons for the structure of the Tudor government's intelligence network? What was it geographical reach and coverage? Can we use network data to show patterns of surveillance? What role did women play in these government networks? And what biases are there in the data? The authors employ methods from the field of network science, translating key concepts and approaches into a language accessible to literary scholars and historians, and illustrating them with examples drawn from this fantastically rich archive. Each chapter is the product of a set of thematically organized 'experiments', which show how particular methods can help to ask and answer research questions specific to the State Papers archive, but also have applications for other large bodies of humanities data. The fundamental aim of this book, therefore, is not merely to provide an innovative perspective on Tudor politics; it also aspires to introduce an entirely new audience to the methods and applications of network science, and to suggest the suitability of these methods for a range of humanistic inquiry.

Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the ‘respublica litteraria’, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community, we need a revolution in digital communications. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.

*Includes pictures *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "We are, by the sufferance of God, King of England; and the Kings of England in times past never had any superior but God." - King Henry VIII During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, spy networks were a significant factor in England's security for the first time in the nation's history. Documents from that era reveal hints of the work of England's agents at home and abroad, as well as the activities of foreign agents within the country. This was, of course, not the first time spies had been used. For as long as there have been nations, people have looked for ways to covertly gather information about each other. But in the 16th century, the information gathering and use of covert actions gained a level of organization and importance that had not previously been seen in Western Europe. The organization of spy networks and the monarchy's perceived need for them can be traced back to the manner in which the Tudors came to power, and Henry VIII's reign. Over 450 years after his reign, Henry VIII is still the most famous and recognizable King of England, but it's for all the wrong reasons. Though well regarded by contemporaries as a learned king and "one of the most charismatic rulers to sit on the English throne," he is best remembered today for his gluttony and multiple marriages, particularly the gruesome way in which he was widowed on more than one occasion. Naturally, that was the focus of the popular Showtime drama series centered around his life, The Tudors. When Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1652, many commentators heralded the beginning of her reign as the second Elizabethan age. The first one, of course, concerned the reign of Henry VIII's second surviving daughter and middle surviving child, Queen Elizabeth I, one of England's most famous and influential rulers. It was an age when the arts, commerce and trade flourished. It was the epoch of gallantry and great, enduring literature. It was also an age of wars and military conflicts in which men were the primary drivers and women often were pawns. Elizabeth I changed the rules of the game and indeed she herself was changed by the game. She was a female monarch of England, a kingdom that had unceremoniously broken with the Catholic Church, and the Vatican and the rest of Christendom was baying for her blood. She had had commercial and militaristic enemies galore. In the end, she helped change the entire structure of female leadership. Elizabeth often has been featured in biographies that were more like hagiographies, glossing over her fits of temper, impatience and other frailties. It is fair to say, however, that she had also inherited her grandfather's political acumen and her father's magnificence, thus creating not just one of the most colorful courts in Europe but also one of the most effective governments in English history. Elizabeth had also fought for her life time and time again in an era that was already unsafe for female leaders and she probably had remembered the searing feeling of realizing that her mother had been executed by her father arguably on a trumped-up charge. Danger was pervasive, and strategy was needed to survive and thrive. Spies in Tudor England: The History and Legacy of English Spy Networks during the Tudor Period looks at the complicated process by which the English monarchy developed spy networks. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the spies of the Tudor period like never before.

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. This Element contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purposes of power, surveillance, and commercial gain. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Annotation This volume reconstructs the lives of Henry VII's new men - low-born ministers with legal, financial, political, and military skills who enforced the king's will as he sought to strengthen government after the Wars of the Roses, examining how they exercised power, gained wealth, and spent it to sustain their new-found status.

ONE OF BLOOMBERG'S BEST BOOKS, 2016 FOREWORD BY NOURIEL ROUBINI $UPERHUBS is a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the world's most powerful titans, the -superhubs- pull the levers of our global financial system. Combining insider's knowledge with principles of network science, Sandra Navidi offers a startling new perspective on how superhubs build their powerful networks and how their decisions impact all our lives. $UPERHUBS reveals what happens at the exclusive, invitation-only platforms - The World Economic Forum in Davos, the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, think-tank gatherings and exclusive galas. This is the most vivid portrait to date of the global elite: the bank CEOs, fund managers, billionaire financiers and politicians who, through their interlocking relationships and collective influence are transforming our increasingly fragile financial system, economy and society.

The final book of the Tudor series from #1 New York Times bestselling author Philippa Gregory features one of the most famous women in history, Lady Jane Grey, and her two sisters, each of whom dared to defy her queen. Jane Grey was queen of England for nine days. Her father and his allies crowned her instead of the dead king’s half-sister Mary Tudor, who quickly mustered an army, claimed her throne, and locked Jane in the Tower of London. When Jane refused to betray her Protestant faith, Mary sent her to the executioner’s block, where Jane transformed her father’s greedy power-grab into tragic martyrdom. “Learn you to die,” was the advice Jane wrote to her younger sister Katherine, who has no intention of dying. She intends to enjoy her beauty and her youth and fall in love. But she is heir to the insecure and infertile Queen Mary and then to her sister Queen Elizabeth, who will never allow Katherine to marry and produce a Tudor son. When Katherine’s pregnancy betrays her secret marriage, she faces imprisonment in the Tower, only yards from her sister’s scaffold. “Farewell, my sister,” writes Katherine to the youngest Grey sister, Mary. A beautiful dwarf, disregarded by the court, Mary keeps family secrets, especially her own, while avoiding Elizabeth’s suspicious glare. After seeing her sisters defy their queens, Mary is acutely aware of her own danger, but determined to command her own life. What will happen when the last Tudor defies her ruthless and unforgiving cousin Queen Elizabeth?

Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England represents one of the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period to be undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.