Guillaume Farel’s Network, 1524-1536

 

From 1524-1536, Guillaume Farel led French Reform efforts outside of France.  The three following diagrams are based on his surviving correspondence from those years.  The first analyzes the “degree centrality” of Farel’s chief correspondents.  I have eliminated all those with whom Farel exchanged only one letter during this period.  This analysis shows in essence which people Farel was in contact with most consistently throughout the period. For example, one sees from the total correspondence that Farel exchanged more letters with Christophe Fabri than with anyone else during this period, but they almost all came in the last two years; thus, his “degree centrality” is significantly lower than that of Oecolampadius, for example.

 

 

The second figure analyzes the degree of centrality of the cities with which he was in contact during this period (in other words, a letter exchanged with Zwingli in Zurich would be reflected as “Zurich”).  Here, I have included all of his correspondence since often a single letter he exchanged with someone was from the same city as that of one of his more frequent correspondents.  Essentially the more consistently he was in touch with a particular city over this period, the more “central” it is.

 

 

Finally, the third image is a “one-node” analysis of “degree centrality” of the cities of Farel’s correspondence.  In other words, it analyzes for each letter both the place from which and the place to which the letter was sent.  Here one notes the centrality of the cities where Farel himself was active: Strasbourg, Aigle, Murten, and Geneva.