While many periods of history are popularly known by their 'great men',
the Enlightenment stands out for the prominence of its 'great groups’. This volume assembles
leading scholars using data-driven scholarship to study the networks that made
the Enlightenment possible, and contributed to creating a new sense of European
identity. From Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great, to Adam
Smith’s travels on the European continent, mediated and unmediated
communication networks were the lifeline of the Enlightenment. What is particularly notable about the
Enlightenment is how these different networks were central to their
participants’ identity. One could not
take part in the Enlightenment on one’s own.



Although some older historical studies highlight
the importance of social networks in the Enlightenment, data-driven approaches
allow for a more comprehensive and granular understanding of the many different
types of networks that formed the intellectual and cultural infrastructure of
the Enlightenment throughout Europe. The recent influx of metadata from the
correspondences of major Enlightenment figures now allows scholars to study
these networks at both the micro and macro levels, and to explore the worlds of
the philosophes and the “nodes” in
their networks in rich detail.



It is at this intersection of Enlightenment
historiography, data capture, and social network analysis that the essays
collected in this volume all fall, taking advantage of new data sources,
configurations, and modes of analysis to deepen our understanding of how
Enlightenment sociability worked, who it included, and what it meant for
participants.