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.