The creation of accelerating networks of mobility and communication was a key feature of the European Middle Ages. Despite longstanding tropes stressing the isolated character of medieval life and the exotic character of medieval travel and mobility, the Middle Ages created and sustained many multipolar communication networks. It excelled at exchange: the period from 1000-1800 in many ways represents one block of techno-material development, the age of the stone bridge, the riding horse, the seaworthy ship, the wheel widely deployed, and the rapid flow of letters, stories, and notions, as much as merchandise.

Focussing on the period from the tenth century through the early fifteenth, this panel explores the phenomenon of communicative network construction. Across Europe in a variety of different contexts, both intensive and extensive networks were produced that linked different sorts of institutions and individuals, some apparently small, some large. These processes were in play in Iberia and England, Italy and Germany, just to mention the areas where this panel will focus.

This vision of the medieval is highlighted in the research conducted for this panel. For instance, by analyzing the dynamics of the origin of the “reform church” of the eleventh century and the Cistercian monastic movement in the thirteenth centuries--two of the great cultural powers of the age--papers by Kathryn Jasper and Helen Birkett show how power and culture were constituted. Birkett compares the ‘real’ networks of the influential monk Caesarius of Heisterbach’s personal and institutional contacts with the ‘fictional’ networks found in his text’s miracle stories, teasing out their complexities. Jasper shows through geographic visualization of biographies how two saintly hermits of the millennium’s turn, Saints Romuald and John Gualbertus, were insistently mobile and thereby key creating vectors of the transformative Gregorian Reform movement.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries administrative self-consciousness created larger, centralised communication networks that routinized much travel and its speed. Shaw shows that the English king’s thirteenth-century itinerant court administration both regulated and demanded travel and communication not only by officials but also by the population at large. This is what actually made the English common law common. From a more private perspective, the vast collection of mercantile letters sent by the Datini company across the later medieval Mediterranean allow Franklin-Lyons to discern the developing communication tactics adopted to speed news and manage costs, notably leading to the separation of sending letters from sending merchandise.

Each paper shows the effect of decisive mobility, starting as localized or individualized action but capable of spreading as part of a network across kingdoms. The method in all of these papers includes extensive use of contemporary digital humanities techniques, especially social network analysis and Geographic Information Systems. They also employ collaborative methods, notably through lab research models involving student researchers, ideas developed in The Travelers Lab. These techniques allow the identification, visualization, and analysis of often otherwise opaque or under appreciated patterns of connection and mobility, providing new eyes for the Middle Ages.