Prosopography: Scoping Projects

#Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this resource, students should be able to:

• Set effective boundaries on prosopography projects

#Scoping a Project

The scope of a project, as we’re defining it for this class, is basically the answer to the question “who gets into your club”? As a prosopographer, you have a range of people and characters available in your source material, but you need to set some sort of boundaries to your project.

There are three main reasons for setting out a formal scope:

It tells other people what they can find in your database.

This is extremely important for making databases other people can subsequently use – they need to know on what basis people get into your database, so they know how much the filter of people for their project overlaps with that.

It makes your project manageable in scale and planning.

Without any kinds of limits or boundaries, a prosopography can extend almost infinitely – you need to be able to plan the work you can feasibly do, or at least plan a set of meaningful units of work.

It interacts with your research questions.

You make databases of people, in general, for a reason: you want to use them. But how you can best use them is highly dependent on what they actually do and don’t contain. The most important question here is whether you’re aiming to model a period or space of history, or index or discuss a particular source or set of sources.

#Scoping Questions

Aiming to model history via prosopography, for example, might include questions like “how able were widows among the late medieval merchant class in Frankfurt to control their estates after their husbands’ death?”, or “were factions in the Carthaginan state bound together by shared commercial interests?” or “to what extent were non-Chinese generals or officials able to rise to high social rank under the T’ang dynasty?”

In these questions, the aim of the prosopography is to use a collection of person data to examine the actions of historical actors. This in turn means that producing the most complete view possible of a person is important – the database needs to be as accurate a description of what the scholar thinks actually happened as possible.

#Prosopographical Indexing

Prosopographical indexes of bodies of source material serve different functions to databases that act as historical models, despite potentially looking nominally similar. In these cases, the aim is to index a particular document, and cleave more closely to the original text.

Prosopographical Indexes are useful for general purpose databases, for the following reasons:

Documentation that attempts to include all relevant material, or at least enough to produce a full model of what was happening, is more labour intensive to produce by far.

Indexing just requires a scholar to say”I have no idea what the answer to these questions is or if source material exists for them!” and make the usually less controversial statement of “this text says thing X and is referring to object Y” without the extra jump of “and I think X is/is not what actually happened”.

It allows sources with different language requirements to be handled in a more separate – and thus more effectively specialised – manner.

This will thereby potentially improve the quality of the overall work.

It may allow the data to be closer to the source with less historical analysis added in.

This will make it more useful for scholars who want an index of people in a given text, or want to be able to look at the material without another prior scholar’s conceptions.

It makes it easier to look at how the author of a specific text presented people.

This will mean it is thereby more useful for work on narratives and historical textual work.

In practice, the division between index and model is not as neat as has been presented here. Many projects have a limited source range but can still be used for modelling projects, for example the People of Medieval Scotland database does not use the major narrative sources, but in allowing access to a wide range of tagged legal documents can provide a basis for meaningful analyses of action via looking at connections and signatories.

The above division will nonetheless be useful to be getting on with, and we’ll return to it later in much more detail. This division of research questions helps inform what parameters you use to define your scope. These can broadly be split into two categories, which tend towards, whilst not necessarily mapping neatly onto, the above division of database type and research question. Firstly there are scope boundaries that are created by textual features, and secondly there are those that are created by historical features.

#Examples

The former category, textual scoping, defines “entry to the club” by questions about texts and sources – does the person appear in a particular source or type of source, or do they appear in a certain language group’s body of sources?

Here are two examples or criteria:

Source

Whilst any database will need a list of sources consulted,some databases are primarily attempts to work with a certain source or type of source. For example some may be prosopographical databases of epigraphy (that is, inscriptions) or legal texts like charters, or will focus on a particular author’s works.

Language

Many areas of history have source material from a number of different language groups available. For indexing, division by language can be sensible to allow specialists on different language areas an angle to work on their material.

The latter category, historical scoping, defines “entry to the club” by questions about the people under discussion – where they were, when they were, and who they were. This is more necessary for modelling questions where the scholar is more keen to test questions about a specific group of people and the society and world they lived in.

A non-exhaustive list of categories for scoping is as follows:

Chronology

Relatively self explanatory, setting dated bounds for the project.

Space

Setting a spatial bound. This and the chronology bound may apply within records as well as to entire people. For example, a prosopography of C13 China might include Marco Polo, but might not want to include in detail notes on his travels around Italy and western Asia which fall well beyond the scope of the project.

Role

For example, only people with particular offices are included, or people in a particular faction or grouping. Beard’s analysis of the members of the US constitutional convention is an example here.

Identity

For example, only people with a certain ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, etc, are included. This functions somewhat similarly to the role category in some ways, excepting that identity is often written about in more oblique ways.

Connection

If one particular figure is at the core of the study, the category could be people with known connections to that person. The difficulty of this sort of category is that it requires more circular working – one may for example need to produce the data and then refine it after doing analyses of the networks involved.

Of course all of these categories may have edge cases, and one of the difficulties is working out where to draw the line and making oneself rules for where to do so, as you may find out during data productions. One notable feature of historical scoping is that it often requires more historical judgement, as for example ethnic terminology is not usually applied consistently in historical sources, and may well be left out especially for common cases (so a medieval Irish text for example won’t repeatedly tell you that every character is Irish as they’re introduced, that’s just an assumed normal).

These scoping features, including both textual and historical categories, can and usually are combined, and the neat distinction drawn here will break down to a noticeable extent. There are some areas where it is rare for scholars to actually be able to consult all the extant material, so even if the scope is not nominally textual, clarity on which sources were incorporated into the project is a necessity. Meanwhile in textual-scope databases there are often still some limitations on inclusion – many medieval chronicles have starting sections that give a brief summary of events from the creation to the main point of the chronicle, or insert analogies and stories about classical heroes, which means a chronology requirement can be useful to avoid Adam and Eve needing to be detailed in every database.

#The Richard the Lionheart Problem

One way of summarising a lot of these rules and how to think about them practically is the Richard the Lionheart Problem. Richard I of England had a varied career that involved stretches in England, France, Cyprus, Outremer, and Austria, among others.

So, if someone made a prosopography of medieval Cyprus, how much about Richard should they include? How meaningful, on the other hand, would it be useful to produce a source-based prosopography that tried to follow Richard through a narrative of his life, with his movements connecting people from the court in London to Saladin’s military camps in the Holy Land? There’s no “right answer” to these questions, they’re dependent on what you’re trying to do with the data.