4 The New York ReviewWimple Networks
Marina WarnerRelations of Power:
Women’s Networks in
the Middle Ages
edited by Emma O. Bérat,
Rebecca Hardie, and Irina Dumitrescu.
Göttingen: V&R unipress/
Bonn University Press, 199 pp., 40.“Twitchers” is the slang term for bird
lovers who, binoculars at the ready, keep
patient vigil, watching for the twitch of a
twig or flutter of a leaf, the quick gleam
of an eye in a thicket, for the mottle on a
field to reveal a flock and lift up into the
air. If looking for women in medieval
records demands comparable training,
alertness, sensitivity, and steadiness of
purpose, then looking for the relations
of power that connected them to one
another demands even greater concen-
tration, with a strong measure of de-
tective induction. The contributors to
this collection of eight intricate, hard-
won essays draw out several figures
from the silt of forgetting. However,
while redressing the injustice of his-
tory, they are also setting out to define
afresh the modes and forms of power
that medieval women used by listening
to the stories objects tell, auscultating
the evidence of jewels, images, litur-
gical arrangements, and architectural
plans.
Relations of Power is short but its
span is immense, moving from circa
300 CE through to the Tudors, with a
foray into seventeenth- century Spain.
The authors aren’t concerned with
the famous queens Mélisende of Jeru-
salem or Blanche of Castile, nor the
brilliant nuns and scholars Hildegard
of Bingen or Héloïse, nor the vision-
aries Hadewijch or Margery Kempe.
Some of these heroines were already
so renowned in my youth that they
made it into a regular strip called
Great Women of the World on the
back page of the comic Girl, which my
father would bring home for me from
his bookshop in the 1950s. The schol-
ars here are searching for more obscure
subjects, to reveal instead “under-
recognised female relationships and
communities” and explore the mate-
rial conditions and contacts of wom-
en’s lives. Sites of inquiry include early
Islam, the English court of Edward I
in the thirteenth century, and Castile in
the mid- fourteenth to mid- fifteenth cen-
turies, among others. (The essays don’t
follow chronological order, and the
book badly needs an index and a map.)
After the graphic heroics in Girl,
it was the medievalist Eileen Power
who, with a flair for reanimating the
past in such books as Medieval English
Nunneries (1922) and the posthumous
collection of her lectures, Medieval
Women (1975), conjured the texture of
women’s lives for my generation.^1 The
Middle Ages seemed a lost moment
of grace, self- expression, and auton-
omy for women, and in the decades
since Power was writing, feminists have
continued to be attracted to storiesdemonstrating female excellence in
those times. Barbara Newman’s stud-
ies of Hildegard, starting with Sister
of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology
of the Feminine (1987), translated that
scholar, composer, and mystic out of
obscure archives and led the way to
her appreciation by a general reading
public.
But such valiant acts of redress were
accompanied by a necessary recogni-
tion that to be born female meant put-
ting up with deep structural inequality,
from which modernity was to deliver
the second sex. The magnificent ex-
ceptions can’t make up for, let alone
make disappear, the multitude of
women who were subjugated, silenced,
and oppressed, as embodied in the
legend of Patient Griselda, the unof-
ficial patron saint of female suffering,
who endures endless torments at the
hands of her husband— false accusa-
tions, separation from her children,
dispossession— and was upheld as
a model of female conduct because,
when told her maltreatment has sim-
ply been a test of her wifely devotion,
she shows only humble gratitude. (The
medieval writers who set the legend
down on paper— Boccaccio, Petrarch,
Chaucer— strike an ironical note, but
Christine de Pizan in her Book of the
City of Ladies seems to see Griselda asa straight allegory of female Christian
virtue.)In their introduction to Relations of
Power, Emma O. Bérat and Rebecca
Hardie explain that they and their con-
tributors are followers of network the-
ory, as formulated by Franco Moretti in
his analysis of Hamlet and the Chinese
novel The Story of the Stone, or The
Dream of the Red Chamber.^2 Network
theory is a child of the digital age: a
quantitative approach to literary criti-
cism that depends on computer model-
ing of exchanges and relationships in a
text. Think flight paths across the globe:
the busy hubs (Heathrow, O’Hare)
show up on a map as dense clusters, with
hundreds of arcs springing from them
to the destinations they serve, thinning
out toward less frequented places.
Likewise, network theory takes a
novel or a play and plots the charac-
ters’ actions and encounters on a graph;
in the jargon, each actor is known as a
“node” or a “vertex,” while interactions
with others are represented by “edges.”
Computer algorithms applied to litera-
ture can, Moretti argues, makethe past just as visible as the pres-
ent: that is one major change in-
troduced by the use of networks.
Then, they make visible specific
“regions” within the plot as a
whole: sub- systems, that share
some significant property.Over five charts breaking down the
networks in Hamlet, Moretti reveals
Claudius as the towering twin pole of
the play, embedded in the thick cluster
constituted by the court of Elsinore;
by contrast, a character like Horatio,
Hamlet’s friend and someone of cru-
cial psychological importance to him,
drops to the periphery of the graph.
Adapting this approach to histori-
cal events, not fictive plots, the medi-
evalists in Relations of Power argue
that the theory will bring out another
structure beneath the patent domi-
nance of men, delineating regions of
female influence. As Caroline Levine
comments in her book Forms: Whole,
Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015),
also of importance to the authors in
Relations of Power, networks upend
tired hierarchical thinking. She quotes
Deleuze and Guattari’s enthusiasm,
“Nothing is beautiful or loving or po-
litical aside from underground stems
and aerial roots,” but she qualifies this
rather vatic claim when she writes, “Po-
litically, [networks] are neither consis-
tently emancipatory— freeing us from
a fixed or dominant order— nor always
threatening— trouncing sovereignty or
dissolving protective boundaries.”
I haven’t been much persuaded by
quantitative methods myself because,
as Moretti comments, they flatten time
into space: if you generate a cluster by
plotting the people who come and go in,
say, William of Tyre’s chronicles of the
crusader kingdom, you can show who
interconnects with whom, but they will
appear to be doing so all at once and all
together. Teaching students nurtured on
Google, it’s often worrying how weak
their grasp of chronology is: the cyber-
sphere may be geographically vast and
marvelously interconnected, but it is
happening in an eternal present.
Nor does network theory, in its cur-
rent state of development, allow for
considerations of character, motive,
emotion, or forms of expression be-
tween subjects, not to speak of the tex-
ture of the writer’s language. A chart
can trace links and junctions but not
their sequence of occurrence, nor the
reason for them, nor the temper of
the occasion. However, Moretti doesn’t
oversell his method: he concedes that
his charts— which in the end he drew by
hand, as he could not achieve what he
wanted digitally— fail to show who kills
whom in Hamlet, whether they intended
to, or why. Nor can they express the
words that Shakespeare or Cao Xueqin
chose to tell their stories. Thoughts and
feelings, soliloquies, and private con-
versation depend on writers’ literary
inventiveness and fall outside the reach
of historians, at least according to the
principles of historiography today.Nevertheless, the medievalists in Re-
lations of Power have scored some suc-
cess by applying the theory in order to
reveal women’s busyness in the distantAidan Hart: St. Ethelburga of Barking, 2020Aidan Hart(^1) Francesca Wade vividly captures
Power’s magnetism in her recent, lively
group biography, Square Haunting:
Five Writers in London Between the
Wars (Tim Duggan, 2020); reviewed in
these pages by Daphne Merkin, Febru-
ary 11, 2021.
(^2) Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot
Analysis,” New Left Review, March/
April 2011.
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