Beyond Networks: Hierarchical Clustering, Hypothesis Testing and the Dynamics of Religious Change in Medieval Contexts

When: Thursday, March 27, 2025, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Where: Online

Online Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) session with Dr Delfi Nieto-Isabel 

In recent years, the term ‘network’ has become a sort of cure-all that is often bandied about as if it was self-explanatory. Complex graphs and data visualisations are recurrently used in conferences and articles, and network analysis is slowly but surely turning into a staple of Digital History. However, on average, most network studies still rely on qualitative approaches that, valid as they are, fall short of fulfilling the potential of these methodologies for furthering our understanding of past societies.

In this talk, I will discuss the application of formal methods of data and network analysis to the study of religious change in medieval Europe. I will present the relational perspective as the theoretical framework that is better suited to tackle the dynamics of transmission of non-mainstream religious ideas and practices, and highlight how this toolkit can help historians identify gaps in their knowledge by prompting unexpected questions. 

Speaker

Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a Lecturer at the School of History and a Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Queen Mary University of London. She started out as a physicist and then became a medievalist. She got her PhD at the University of Barcelona in 2018, was a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School in 2021-22, and a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Fellow at Queen Mary. Currently, she's an Academic Fellow of Queen Mary's Digital Environment Research Institute, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and the Co-Director of the Digital Lives Programme at Queen Mary's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She co-edited Living on the Edge: Transgression, Exclusion and Persecution in the Middle Ages (Gruyter, 2022) and, more recently, a Special Issue of the Medieval Journal of the University of Bologna (2024). Her forthcoming book, Networks of Defiance: Women and Heretical Conversion in the Late Middle Ages applies Social Network Analysis to the study of the practices and beliefs of women in dissident religious movements in the Late Middle Ages.

For more details and to receive a link to join, email Stephanie Amin stephanie.amin@qmul.ac.uk.