Unknown But Not Unknowable: The Network of Identified and Unidentified Hands in the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript

Abstract

This article draws on the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript represented in the form of a Neo4j graph and the practices of digital prosopography to better understand the circulation of poetry in the sixteenth-century English court. A Neo4j can represent attributes of real-world entities in the form of a graph, which can illuminate patterns in large amounts of information that are difficult to retain otherwise. The paper is motivated by the INKE Modelling and Prototyping team’s objective of improving the analysis of extant and developing digital resources in ways that meaningfully extend the codex form. The authors argue that the manuscript has the same value for scholars interested in its unnamed contributors as for those interested in its named contributors.