From 4262f5a7f6abe42476be02107d7e70e2f4f73cf4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mimi <47319502+biumiamy@users.noreply.github.com> Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:36:15 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] corrections - update from American English to British English - correction spacing and citations --- paper.md | 54 ++++++++++++++++++------------------------------------ 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 36 deletions(-) diff --git a/paper.md b/paper.md index 9fcb774..05294d5 100644 --- a/paper.md +++ b/paper.md @@ -54,21 +54,21 @@ Early modern Europe witnessed an unprecedented revolution in information culture In February 1600 a seemingly peculiar news reached the Medici court in Florence: a woman ambassador from Persia arrived at the Ottoman court in Constantinople. The short report about her arrival came as part of a handwritten news sheet compiled in Vienna (ASF MdP, 3087). Were contemporary news mongers surprised reading this news? Or was reading about a woman who acted decisively and boldly common for early modern news consumers? -Answering these questions is not easy. Early modern Europe witnessed an information revolution featured - in part - by the continual circulation of handwritten news sheets or avvisi in Italian (, ,). Later, from the early 1600s, handwritten news sheets were complemented with printed news, though handwritten news continued to play an important role until the mid 18th century. News was collected in large urban centers (henceforth, news hubs) of the continent by semi-professional newsagents; they assembled single news items into handwritten news sheets . Hence each news sheet is a consecutive sequence of news items that are organized into separate paragraphs. News agents, who could be postmasters, merchants or even diplomats and ambassadors residing abroad, sold their news sheets to a great variety of customers including ducal courts and merchant houses such as for instance the grand ducal court of the Medici in Florence and the Fuggers in Augsburg (,). These news sheets were usually compiled in the native language of the customers; hence, the Medici received most of the news sheets in Italian and the Fuggers mainly read news in German. What types of information handwritten news sheets spread about women have not been studied, even though it is a relevant question for historians. The broader relevance is given by scholarship’s efforts to discover and present women’s representation in historical sources . +Answering these questions is not easy. Early modern Europe witnessed an information revolution featured - in part - by the continual circulation of handwritten news sheets or avvisi in Italian (, , ). Later, from the early 1600s, handwritten news sheets were complemented with printed news, though handwritten news continued to play an important role until the mid 18th century (). News was collected in large urban centers (henceforth, news hubs) of the continent by semi-professional newsagents; they assembled single news items into handwritten news sheets (). Hence each news sheet is a consecutive sequence of news items that are organized into separate paragraphs. News agents, who could be postmasters, merchants or even diplomats and ambassadors residing abroad, sold their news sheets to a great variety of customers including ducal courts and merchant houses such as for instance the grand ducal court of the Medici in Florence and the Fuggers in Augsburg (,). These news sheets were usually compiled in the native language of the customers; hence, the Medici received most of the news sheets in Italian and the Fuggers mainly read news in German. What types of information handwritten news sheets spread about women have not been studied, even though it is a relevant question for historians. The broader relevance is given by scholarship’s efforts to discover and present women’s representation in historical sources (). -However, scholarship on early modern women history cannot answer the question, to which extent the story of the woman ambassador was a genuine novelty for contemporary readers. Recent scholarship focusing on early modern women history studied the representation of women in a great variety of sources, including letters, literary works, and court records. For instance, topics, social activities and roles associated with early modern women have been studied (; ). Recent scholarship of women's history has also challenged the traditional perception of early modern women as passive protagonists of history (). Through the systematic study of historical records, historians have uncovered different areas of woman agency and pointed out that woman agency was not altogether exceptional. Women agency manifested in specific domains of knowledge and skills such as medicine and household management, and information gathering(;; ;). Women did engage with political and material culture, as well as with knowledge production and they did shape the course of history. Throughout the early modern period there were a number of powerful women, such as for instance the English queen Elisabeth I. (1558 - 1603), who ruled entire countries. However, students of women’s history have not surveyed handwritten news; unlike news pamphlets, avvisi have not been studied from the perspective of women's history. We do not therefore know what representations of womanhood were conveyed in this important group of historical sources. This exploratory study aims to contribute to women’s history by addressing this lacuna. +However, scholarship on early modern women history cannot answer the question, to which extent the story of the woman ambassador was a genuine novelty for contemporary readers. Recent scholarship focusing on early modern women history studied the representation of women in a great variety of sources, including letters, literary works, and court records. For instance, topics, social activities and roles associated with early modern women have been studied (; ). Recent scholarship of women's history has also challenged the traditional perception of early modern women as passive protagonists of history (). Through the systematic study of historical records, historians have uncovered different areas of woman agency and pointed out that woman agency was not altogether exceptional. Women agency manifested in specific domains of knowledge and skills such as medicine and household management, and information gathering (; ; ; ). Women did engage with political and material culture, as well as with knowledge production and they did shape the course of history. Throughout the early modern period there were a number of powerful women, such as for instance the English queen Elisabeth I. (1558 - 1603), who ruled entire countries. However, students of women’s history have not surveyed handwritten news; unlike news pamphlets, avvisi have not been studied from the perspective of women's history (. +The lack of studies investigating women’s representation in early modern handwritten news is due to the fact that these sources were not easy to research until not long ago. Most of the surviving news sheets remained unpublished and untranscribed in various archives and libraries of the world. Recently, thanks to the Euronews Project (https://euronewsproject.org) funded by the Irish Research Council and to the Medici Archive Project (https://www.medici.org/) funded by the Mellon Foundation, a large selection of transcribed Italian language handwritten news sheets (a corpus of approximately 1250 news sheets and 10800 individual news items, see the description of data set below) from the Florentine State Archive became publicly available on the MIA platform and database (https://mia.medici.org/, last accessed 1 February, 2024). In this essay I will investigate this selection and I will refer to it as the MIA-Euronews Corpus. Specifically, the main focus of my investigation will be women and their representation in early modern handwritten news sheets. The focus on representation is in line with most recent developments in media history discovering women representation in different modern media formats (). However, this paper also has another key focus: methodology and historiography of early modern handwritten news sheets. The MIA-Euronews Corpus is just an immense and not representative sample of handwritten news sheets that once circulated in early modern Europe. Given that no explicit principles were followed by the team who aggregated it, the MIA-Euronews Corpus is a random and somewhat ad hoc snapshot of the vivid early modern news culture. In this sense, the MIA-Euronews Corpus represents very well the heart of the methodological and historical problem that the study of the early modern handwritten news sheet market involves: the totality of early modern handwritten news sheets perished; today there is a lost whole of these documents; as a result historians can only work with incomplete snapshots. Since most of the time factors determining which news sheets survived and which ones perished are unknown, the existing news sheet collections seem to be random samples from the lost whole. This leads to an important methodological and historiographical question I will address as the secondary focus of my paper: how can we explore a random sample of historical documents and say something about the original and lost document collection from which the random sample comes from? As part of the second focus of this paper, I will show that we can still discover how randomness of incomplete samples (from a lost whole) works, and based on this we can make inferences about the lost whole itself. -The surveying of lost historical documents and collections has recently become an important area of historical research. Historians and digital humanists have adopted methods from ecology and Bayesian statistics to gather information about the size of once existing document collections (;;). For instance, Mike Kestemont et al. have applied the so-called unseen species model to study the loss of medieval narratives (). This paper aims to contribute to this novel area of study, though its aim is not to gauge the volume of once circulating early modern handwritten news sheets; it rather aims to gather insights into the content of these lost documents. +The surveying of lost historical documents and collections has recently become an important area of historical research. Historians and digital humanists have adopted methods from ecology and Bayesian statistics to gather information about the size of once existing document collections (; ; ). For instance, Mike Kestemont et al. have applied the so-called unseen species model to study the loss of medieval narratives (). This paper aims to contribute to this novel area of study, though its aim is not to gauge the volume of once circulating early modern handwritten news sheets; it rather aims to gather insights into the content of these lost documents. @@ -90,7 +90,7 @@ First, how often did contemporary readers hear about women? This question implie ### Limitations of this study -The new sheets I worked with cover a period of 200 years (see Figure 1) and they arrived from a great variety of source locations (see Figure 2). These 200 years mark a particularly tumultuous period in Europe. The early modern period witnessed not only an information revolution but also other profound social and economic transformations and historical events: the discovery of the new world, the Reformation and subsequent religious divides, witch hunts and long lasting wars (30 year war, the war against the Ottoman Empire, etc). Despite the urgent need to study how the presence and the perception of women changed in space and time, the diachronic and synchronic analysis of the MIA-Euronews Corpus will be limited in this study. This is due to the fact that the corpus is not balanced; yet, as Figure 1 and Figure 2 demonstrate, news sheets available in the corpus are quite unevenly distributed in space and time. I will therefore limit the diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of women’s presence or absence. In particular, I will compare the presence or absence of women in two periods (before and after 1600) and in the new sheets that came from the seven most important news hubs in the MIA-Euronews Corpus: London, Naples, Rome, Milan, Venice, Vienna, Antwerp (these arbitrary temporal boundaries are explained by the unevennes of my dataset). By contrast, when studying the perception of women, I will treat the corpus as one monolithic whole without detailing regional differences; the diachronic and synchronic analysis of the women’s perception will be accomplished once a more balanced data will be available. +The new sheets I worked with cover a period of 200 years (see Figure 1) and they arrived from a great variety of source locations (see Figure 2). These 200 years mark a particularly tumultuous period in Europe. The early modern period witnessed not only an information revolution but also other profound social and economic transformations and historical events: the discovery of the new world, the Reformation and subsequent religious divides, witch hunts and long lasting wars (30 year war, the war against the Ottoman Empire, etc). Despite the urgent need to study how the presence and the perception of women changed in space and time, the diachronic and synchronic analysis of the MIA-Euronews Corpus will be limited in this study. This is due to the fact that the corpus is not balanced; yet, as Figure 1 and Figure 2 demonstrate, news sheets available in the corpus are quite unevenly distributed in space and time. I will therefore limit the diachronic and synchronic approaches to the study of women’s presence or absence. In particular, I will compare the presence or absence of women in two periods (before and after 1600) and in the new sheets that came from the seven most important news hubs in the MIA-Euronews Corpus: London, Naples, Rome, Milan, Venice, Vienna, Antwerp (these arbitrary temporal boundaries are explained by the unevenness of my dataset). By contrast, when studying the perception of women, I will treat the corpus as one monolithic whole without detailing regional differences; the diachronic and synchronic analysis of the women’s perception will be accomplished once a more balanced data will be available. ```python tags=["figure-1"] from IPython.display import Image @@ -131,7 +131,7 @@ display(Image('media/image6.png'),metadata=metadata) ### The random walker -The story of the boldly acting woman ambassador is a random finding by my colleague. This story is just one of those millions of stories that the so-called Mediceo del Principato preserves. The Mediceo del Principato is a gigantic archival division in the Florentine State Archive (); it incorporates the Medici family’s major archive from the early modern period. Today, some 6500 archival units, which occupy approximately one and half kilometers of shelf space, form the core of the Mediceo del Principato. News sheets are dispersed through these 6500 archival units. To understand the problem of randomness and sampling, which are in the heart of this paper, consider the following thought experiment. +The story of the boldly acting woman ambassador is a random finding by my colleague. This story is just one of those millions of stories that the so-called Mediceo del Principato preserves. The Mediceo del Principato is a gigantic archival division in the Florentine State Archive (); it incorporates the Medici family’s major archive from the early modern period. Today, some 6500 archival units, which occupy approximately one and half kilometres of shelf space, form the core of the Mediceo del Principato. News sheets are dispersed through these 6500 archival units. To understand the problem of randomness and sampling, which are in the heart of this paper, consider the following thought experiment. There is a person who is literally a random walker; he has two goals. First, he aims to discover the presence and absence of women in the lost corpus of early modern handwritten news sheets. Second, he would like to map those contexts in which women were mentioned and understand the representation of women in early modern handwritten news. @@ -147,7 +147,7 @@ The ‘experience’ of randomness and uncertainty that the thought experiment d To which extent the randomness often experienced by historians working in archives is true or it is only due to the fact that no one has an overview of the complexity underlying millions of loosely organized documents is an open question. This paper views randomness as perceived and as a phenomenon that features unpredictability and uncertainty from the perspective of the posterity. How the true randomness of archives could be tested and distinguished from perceived randomness, i.e. from posteriority’s inability to understand the manifold causes and patterns underlying millions of documents, is subject of further research. -We will continue the thought experiment and see how our random walker copes with uncertainties related to women’s presence and representation in early modern news. As the heart of the matter is the presence of many competing possibilities unearthed throughout an archival research, we will deal with computational methods capable of producing firm and tangible information in the face of many possibilities. Specifically, we will focus on three areas, presence and absence, narratives, semantics, and see how the behavior of randomness underlying many competing possibilities can be investigated and harnessed to build a stable knowledge. +We will continue the thought experiment and see how our random walker copes with uncertainties related to women’s presence and representation in early modern news. As the heart of the matter is the presence of many competing possibilities unearthed throughout an archival research, we will deal with computational methods capable of producing firm and tangible information in the face of many possibilities. Specifically, we will focus on three areas, presence and absence, narratives, semantics, and see how the behaviour of randomness underlying many competing possibilities can be investigated and harnessed to build a stable knowledge. @@ -246,7 +246,7 @@ To answer these questions, he keeps reading the news sheets and “learns” the -I implemented the procedure above on the MIA-Euronews Corpus by means of a mathematical model named Markov Chain (). First, the model “learned” the probabilities of how words follow each other in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. Second, I run the Markov Chain model, which is a form of simulation sometimes named random walk in the literature (). In practice, when we run a Markov Chain modeling the possible sequences of words in a large textual collection, we synthetically generate texts (or possible subsamples) consisting of millions of words. Again, the result exposes all possible ways words in a large textual collection may unfold; it thus enables us to observe how the randomness of words following each other in a given textual collection works. +I implemented the procedure above on the MIA-Euronews Corpus by means of a mathematical model named Markov Chain (). First, the model “learned” the probabilities of how words follow each other in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. Second, I run the Markov Chain model, which is a form of simulation sometimes named random walk in the literature (). In practice, when we run a Markov Chain modelling the possible sequences of words in a large textual collection, we synthetically generate texts (or possible subsamples) consisting of millions of words. Again, the result exposes all possible ways words in a large textual collection may unfold; it thus enables us to observe how the randomness of words following each other in a given textual collection works. The Markovian simulation brought about three pieces of information. First, it revealed the overall or the stable state probability of a given word in the MIA-Euronews Corpus; the overall probability of a word also expresses its significance in the corpus (for further details see the Implementation section). Hence, by calculating the overall probability of certain words referring to women and other historical actors, I could quantify the significance and importance of these words (see Figure 4 and Figure 8 in Section 3 ). Then I manually clustered the most significant words into units of distinct topics (see Figure 7). Second, the Markovian simulation revealed the probability that a given word follows or precedes another word (see Figure 10 and Figures 11 to 14 in Section 4), though this estimate can be inaccurate in case of very infrequent terms. Hence I focused on salient and frequent associations. In short, the Markovian approach helped explore the possible words following or preceding terms denoting women, which in turn offered insights into women’s representation in the corpus. Finally, the Markovian simulation gave information about the strength of association between words (see Figure 9 and Figures 15 to 18 in Section 4). @@ -255,7 +255,7 @@ The Markovian simulation brought about three pieces of information. First, it re With the approach described above I could investigate how information surrounding women in early modern news is likely to unfold in narratives. As opposed to other traditional - static - approaches (for instance Pointwise Mutual Information) uncovering associative relationships between words, the advantage of the Markovian approach is its ability to model texts as dynamic systems, i.e. it lets us discover all possible ways information is discussed in a large textual collection. Most importantly, the Markovian simulation helps quantify the probability of these possible ways. The Markovian simulation also helps tackle the problem of bias; it enables us to go beyond an original non-representative sample by synthetically producing further possible sub-samples. Hence it helped get closer to the lost corpus of early modern handwritten news. Finally, the Markovian simulation of a textual collection shows the collection from a highly informative and less biased viewpoint: stable state (aka equilibrium state). -However, the Markovian approach did not produce an exhaustive set of information about the possible meanings attached to womanhood in early modern news. The heart of the matter is that meaning often remains tacit and the Markovian approach cannot handle tacitness. Furthermore, it is difficult to handle cases of polysemy and homonymy with the Markovian approach. I therefore modeled the meaning of womanhood by reconstructing the semantic space underlying the MIA-Euronews Corpus. +However, the Markovian approach did not produce an exhaustive set of information about the possible meanings attached to womanhood in early modern news. The heart of the matter is that meaning often remains tacit and the Markovian approach cannot handle tacitness. Furthermore, it is difficult to handle cases of polysemy and homonymy with the Markovian approach. I therefore modelled the meaning of womanhood by reconstructing the semantic space underlying the MIA-Euronews Corpus. @@ -583,34 +583,16 @@ plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(2,1.2), borderaxespad=1) When consuming news, Maria Magdalena von Habsburg must have encountered all sorts of information about the world. However, there must have been certain themes that were particularly recurrent on the news sheets she read. Generally speaking, news mongers today or back in the early modern times tend to encounter similar types of information. Previous scholarship came up with a variety of themes that were allegedly prevalent in early modern news (): - * international politics - - * war - - * social affairs (such as royal weddings, royal births and official celebrations) - - * fires, miracles, - - * bloody crimes - - * catastrophes ( unusual weather, plagues) - - * court news (such as royal journeys, royal deaths and triumphal entries, etc) - - * Church news - - * sensational news (monsters, distorted humans, etc) - However, earlier scholarship did not produce information about how important these topics were. While some of them must have been particularly recurrent, others were less frequent themes. Similarly, the most important topics discussed in the context of women’s experience have also remained unknown. In this section, I will therefore reveal the most important topics of news in the MIA-Euronews Corpus, as well as their relationship to women and women’s experience in the early modern period. This discovery process will be supported by the analysis of those words that are strongly associated with women, as well as by the study of the semantic space underlying terms denoting women. Figure 19 renders this semantic space and shows those groups of words to which women terms are semantically related. ```python jdh={"object": {"source": ["Key terms in the news world underlying the MIA-Euronews Corpus. The importance of each term is measured in terms of its stationary probability (column prob)."]}} tags=["hermeneutics", "table-2"] @@ -873,7 +855,7 @@ This topic is generally unrelated to women; it is associated with men. News are ### Information circulation -In May 1642, it was reported from London that the English king, Charles I (1625 - 1649) received a letter from the governors of Ireland who thanked the king’s interest in affairs in Ireland (ASF MdP, 4201). This story exemplifies how court officials and sovereigns used news to keep track of not only geopolitical developments but also information circulation. News sheets often report about the arrival of important letters and messengers; occasionally, they inform readers about letters and messengers sent abroad. The importance of this topic that I name information circulation is signaled by a number of key terms: mandare (to send), rispondere (to answer), lettera (letter), scrivere (to write). Furthermore, news often discusses public opinion and information circulating through word of mouth, which is signaled by the term dire (to say). Information circulation is a theme that is strongly associated with men. For instance, mandare (to send), inviare (to send), spedire (to send) are all associated with men and unrelated to women (see Figures 9 & 10). +In May 1642, it was reported from London that the English king, Charles I (1625 - 1649) received a letter from the governors of Ireland who thanked the king’s interest in affairs in Ireland (ASF MdP, 4201). This story exemplifies how court officials and sovereigns used news to keep track of not only geopolitical developments but also information circulation. News sheets often report about the arrival of important letters and messengers; occasionally, they inform readers about letters and messengers sent abroad. The importance of this topic that I name information circulation is signalled by a number of key terms: mandare (to send), rispondere (to answer), lettera (letter), scrivere (to write). Furthermore, news often discusses public opinion and information circulating through word of mouth, which is signaled by the term dire (to say). Information circulation is a theme that is strongly associated with men. For instance, mandare (to send), inviare (to send), spedire (to send) are all associated with men and unrelated to women (see Figures 9 & 10). ### War @@ -898,7 +880,7 @@ Among the most recurrent topics of early modern news, we can find one that is sp ### Governance and politics -News writers often gave notice about the political development in a given location. This is of course a highly recurrent theme signaled by a number of key terms: ordine (order), impedire (to obstruct), regno (kingdom), affare (affair), governo (government), etc. My findings (see the absence of terms related to governance on Figure 19) suggest that this topic was very much unrelated to women. +News writers often gave notice about the political development in a given location. This is of course a highly recurrent theme signalled by a number of key terms: ordine (order), impedire (to obstruct), regno (kingdom), affare (affair), governo (government), etc. My findings (see the absence of terms related to governance on Figure 19) suggest that this topic was very much unrelated to women. ### Religion @@ -921,13 +903,13 @@ Marriage was viewed as the cornerstone of social order in the early modern perio -What is not surprising is the fact that marriage, including wedding, is the theme that is most strongly associated with women in my newsheet corpus. Beyond the topic of movement in physical space, marriage and wedding are the most important topics in the context in which women occur (see Figure 9 and Figure 12). There are however differences in terms of social status. While women of the elite are strongly associated with marriage, the same cannot be said about women of humble social origins. The term donna (woman), which usually denotes women of humble social origins, is in fact not associated with marriage (see Figures 15 to 18). +What is not surprising is the fact that marriage, including wedding, is the theme that is most strongly associated with women in my newssheet corpus. Beyond the topic of movement in physical space, marriage and wedding are the most important topics in the context in which women occur (see Figure 9 and Figure 12). There are however differences in terms of social status. While women of the elite are strongly associated with marriage, the same cannot be said about women of humble social origins. The term donna (woman), which usually denotes women of humble social origins, is in fact not associated with marriage (see Figures 15 to 18). The close reading of news reporting about marriages revealed an unexpected aspect of the strong associative relationship between women and marriage. In news reporting about marriages women usually remain in the background; sometimes the news do not even mention the name of the bride. For instance, in July 1574 a news sheet was sent from Milan to Florence. The news sheet (ASF MdP 3254) contains a notice of marriage between a certain Pietro Antonio Grasso, most probably a local nobleman, and an unnamed woman. Just like other marriage news, this report mainly focuses on those dignitaries who were present at the wedding. This explains why the term presenza (presence) is salient in the semantic space underlying women terms (see Figure 19). -Generally, marriage notices in the MIA-Euronews Corpus tend to be short and concise. They give the name of the husband and the wife, as well as the day when the marriage was celebrated, consumed or published. For instance, in April 1698, a news sheet arrived from Hamburg to Florence (ASF MdP 4191a) and reported the marriage between Frederick IV (1695 – 1702), the reigning Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and Hedvig Sophia Augusta of Sweden. The news is brief and to the point; it simply gives information about the marriage union without offering any details about the ceremony. Notably, marriage gifts and the amount of the dowry remain unmentioned. Some of the marriage news focus on marriage planning. For instance, a news sheet from Parma, compiled in January 1576, reported that the Duke of Parma, Ottavio Farnese (1547 - 1586), traveled to Turin to discuss a marriage plan for his daughter. Again, the focus of the news is Ottavio’s travel and marriage plan; the name of the daughter is not even mentioned. Other news report about marriage contracts and negotiations of dowries. Again, this group of news highlights the material aspect of marriage alliances and future wives remain in the background. +Generally, marriage notices in the MIA-Euronews Corpus tend to be short and concise. They give the name of the husband and the wife, as well as the day when the marriage was celebrated, consumed or published. For instance, in April 1698, a news sheet arrived from Hamburg to Florence (ASF MdP 4191a) and reported the marriage between Frederick IV (1695 – 1702), the reigning Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and Hedvig Sophia Augusta of Sweden. The news is brief and to the point; it simply gives information about the marriage union without offering any details about the ceremony. Notably, marriage gifts and the amount of the dowry remain unmentioned. Some of the marriage news focus on marriage planning. For instance, a news sheet from Parma, compiled in January 1576, reported that the Duke of Parma, Ottavio Farnese (1547 - 1586), travelled to Turin to discuss a marriage plan for his daughter. Again, the focus of the news is Ottavio’s travel and marriage plan; the name of the daughter is not even mentioned. Other news report about marriage contracts and negotiations of dowries. Again, this group of news highlights the material aspect of marriage alliances and future wives remain in the background. Material aspects and the presence of dignitaries were the focal points of news about wedding ceremonies as well. In April 1600 the Austrian city, Graz, hosted the wedding ceremony of Maria Anna of Bavaria with the future Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Ferdinand II. (1619 - 1637). Through news sheets sent directly from Graz and Vienna, the Medici in Florence could follow the event. These news sheets discuss the arrival of foreign dignitaries, give the names of ambassadors who were present, and describe the lavishness of wedding banquets and processions. Other wedding news in MIA-Euronews Corpus focus on gifts presented at the ceremony. For instance, a news sheet (ASF MdP 4201) that arrived from London in May, 1641 describes the marriage gifts by William II, Prince of Orange (1647 - 1650) to Maria Enrichetta Stuart in great detail, including the price of each gift. Little is actually said about the bride in marriage news; instead, material aspects are salient. @@ -940,7 +922,7 @@ In summary, even though marriage is believed to have been the keystone of early ### Pregnancy and childbirth -The reproductive role of women was highly important in early modern societies. For the elite women as mothers and children as heirs assured the continuity of a dynasty or of a noble family. For artisanal and merchant families children contributed to the completeness of the household that often drew on their labor. Both protestant and catholic theologians underlined the sanctity of the household that would remain incomplete without children (). Despite the apparent importance of childbirth and pregnancy, neither of them are significant themes in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. On the other hand, they are both strongly associated with women (see Figures 9 & 10, 11 to 14, and 15 to 18). +The reproductive role of women was highly important in early modern societies. For the elite women as mothers and children as heirs assured the continuity of a dynasty or of a noble family. For artisanal and merchant families children contributed to the completeness of the household that often drew on their labour. Both protestant and catholic theologians underlined the sanctity of the household that would remain incomplete without children (). Despite the apparent importance of childbirth and pregnancy, neither of them are significant themes in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. On the other hand, they are both strongly associated with women (see Figures 9 & 10, 11 to 14, and 15 to 18). Generally speaking, in the MIA-Euronews Corpus there are only occasional and sporadic mentions of pregnancy. What is also indicative is the fact that pregnancy does not occur as a news alone; it is usually discussed in tandem with other news. For instance, in April 1575 a piece of news arrived from Lyon through Rome (ASF MdP 3082); it extensively reported about fights with Hugenottes and as a side note it also mentioned the pregnancy of Queen of Navarra, Marguerite de Valois-Bourbon. Sometimes news in the MIA-Euronews Corpus comment on the development of the pregnancy including the number of months a woman has completed (for instance, ASF MdP 4191a, ASF MdP 3082, ASF MdP 4572). Occasionally, they give account of a miscarriage, though as the MIA-Euronews Corpus suggests this was a particularly rare theme. @@ -952,11 +934,11 @@ Childbirth and baptism are equally unimportant themes in my dataset. When the ne ### Crime and violence -Crime and violence are not particularly important topics in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. However, as Figure 19 shows, they are semantically related to terms denoting women. But there is a remarkable dichotomy between women of the elite and women of humble origins. Crime and violence are closely associated with women of humble origins. In fact, if women of humble origins are mentioned in the news, they are quite likely to be discussed in the context of crime, violence, and social control (see the axes attaccare (attack) and difesa (defense) on Figure 11 and 15). The relationship between women and crime has two facets in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. +Crime and violence are not particularly important topics in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. However, as Figure 19 shows, they are semantically related to terms denoting women. But there is a remarkable dichotomy between women of the elite and women of humble origins. Crime and violence are closely associated with women of humble origins. In fact, if women of humble origins are mentioned in the news, they are quite likely to be discussed in the context of crime, violence, and social control (see the axes attaccare (attack) and difesa (defence) on Figure 11 and 15). The relationship between women and crime has two facets in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. -On the one hand, there are pieces of news about crimes committed by women. For instance, a news sheet that arrived from Rome in August 1719 (ASF MdP 100) reported about a woman who killed her husband. News sometimes report about the punishment of women, including public whipping, execution, and imprisonment. Reports about crimes by women are not surprising. In the early modern belief system women and transgressive social behavior were closely related (). The connection was in part based on religious ideas. According to the Christian tradition, women were daughters of Eve, which established a direct connection with the Original Sin and the Fall of Man. As a result, in the early modern period it was widely believed that women were vulnerable to the incursions of the devil and to their own natural passions. This belief was also reinforced by premodern “scientific” ideas. According to the elemental physics of Gallen, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek philosophers, the female body is incomplete and vulnerable to uncontrollable emotions and passions. While men were associated with rationality and self-control, women were linked to nature, passion, and savageness. Women were also often subject to social control; this for instance gave rise to the regulation of clothes that women were allowed to wear in public. News sometimes discuss this theme as well. In short, everyday news reinforced the traditional misogynist beliefs of the early modern times by relating women of humble origins to crime. +On the one hand, there are pieces of news about crimes committed by women. For instance, a news sheet that arrived from Rome in August 1719 (ASF MdP 100) reported about a woman who killed her husband. News sometimes report about the punishment of women, including public whipping, execution, and imprisonment. Reports about crimes by women are not surprising. In the early modern belief system women and transgressive social behaviour were closely related (). The connection was in part based on religious ideas. According to the Christian tradition, women were daughters of Eve, which established a direct connection with the Original Sin and the Fall of Man. As a result, in the early modern period it was widely believed that women were vulnerable to the incursions of the devil and to their own natural passions. This belief was also reinforced by premodern “scientific” ideas. According to the elemental physics of Gallen, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek philosophers, the female body is incomplete and vulnerable to uncontrollable emotions and passions. While men were associated with rationality and self-control, women were linked to nature, passion, and savageness. Women were also often subject to social control; this for instance gave rise to the regulation of clothes that women were allowed to wear in public. News sometimes discuss this theme as well. In short, everyday news reinforced the traditional misogynist beliefs of the early modern times by relating women of humble origins to crime. On the other hand, news also often report about violence against women. Again, these reports usually concern women of humble origins. A recurrent theme is violence by soldiers. For instance, a news sheet from Graz compiled in October 1600 extensively discusses the actual state of affairs in the war against the Ottomans (ASF MdP, 51248). It reports about violence of French mercenaries against women. Another news from Cremona, compiled in June 1575, highlights the cruelties of German and Italian soldiers (ASF MdP, 3254). This piece of news pinpoints the heart of the matter. In early modern times peasants were forced to give accommodation to soldiers who often took advantage of this and committed violence, crime, and looting. Sometimes, news also mention petty crimes against women, though this remains sporadic in the MIA-Euronews Corpus. @@ -980,7 +962,7 @@ The reason why news sheets conveyed the traditional gender roles and did not fun ## Implementation -The methodology behind this research consists of three different components and includes a preprocessing stage. Here I will present these three components with a special emphasis on how they resolve the problems outlined in the section addressing randomness and archival research. This section requires advanced knowledge in mathematics and computer science, and it is for specialists. +The methodology behind this research consists of three different components and includes a pre-processing stage. Here I will present these three components with a special emphasis on how they resolve the problems outlined in the section addressing randomness and archival research. This section requires advanced knowledge in mathematics and computer science, and it is for specialists. ### Preprocessing @@ -1095,7 +1077,7 @@ In practice, as the equation demonstrates, throughout the simulation, we need to $$\pi . P = \pi$$ -The stationary probability distribution π is a non-negative row vector that sums to one; it is the left eigenvector of the transition matrix and it remains unchanged if multiplied by the transition matrix. The stationary probability has a number of features that are important in the context of this research. First, it expresses the non-conditional probability of each state of a finite random system modeled as a Markovian system. The stationary probability of a given state is the maximum probability that the simulated system will be in that state irrespectively of the starting distribution. Hence, the stationary probability distribution is a limiting distribution as follows : +The stationary probability distribution π is a non-negative row vector that sums to one; it is the left eigenvector of the transition matrix and it remains unchanged if multiplied by the transition matrix. The stationary probability has a number of features that are important in the context of this research. First, it expresses the non-conditional probability of each state of a finite random system modelled as a Markovian system. The stationary probability of a given state is the maximum probability that the simulated system will be in that state irrespectively of the starting distribution. Hence, the stationary probability distribution is a limiting distribution as follows : $$\lim_{k \to \infty} {P^{k}} = 1\pi$$