"Women in the Early Romantic Correspondence Network"

The Jena (and Berlin) Early Romanticism is considered the outstanding intellectual revolution of young German authors and scholars at the turn of the 19th century. Within the correspondence network modeled in the DFG project "Correspondences of the Early Romantic Period," there are numerous letters from these romantic female authors and figures, such as Dorothea Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel(-Schelling), Sophie Bernhardi-Tieck, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. However, the quantitative study of women in the network poses several gender-specific challenges, such as incomplete transmission of letters or lack of information about women in authority files, to name a few.

How can such marginalized groups be studied using historical network analysis methods without uncritically repeating and thus perpetuating the biases in the sources reflected in the data? What potential does the quantitative analysis of such groups have compared to a purely qualitative approach? This lecture will present these approaches to investigation and ideas for addressing the challenges in the material.