Historical Letters – Objectives, Design, Details

A letter-sending model with historically informed initial positions to reconstruct com-
munication and archiving processes in the Republic of Letters, the 15th- to 17th-century
form of scholarship.

The model is aimed at historians, willing to formalize historical assumptions about the
letter-sending process itself and allows in principle to set heterogeneous social roles, e.g.
to evaluate the role of gender or social status in the formation of letter exchange networks.
The model furthermore includes a pruning process to simulate the loss of letters to
critically asses the role of archiving biases e.g. in relation to gender, geographical regions,
or power structures, in the creation of collections of letters (referred from here on as
empirical letter archives