VisszaAbstract:
My thesis was a study of the scope, composition, and social roles of the Norman royal court of Palermo as reported by ‘Hugo Falcandus’ in his Historia or Liber de Regno Sicilie, a narrative that relates the affairs of state and intrigues of the kingdom under William I and the first years of William II (1154-1169). The Liber, attributed to ‘Hugo Falcandus’ (pseudo-Falcandus), became a fundamental text for the understanding of the Norman kingdom of Sicily in the second half of the twelfth century. The project sought an integrative approach that would allow me to comprehend the social process and political dynamics present in the textual, narrative source. The matter upon which the study was founded was the interactions between social actors as narrated in the text (i.e. courtiers, nobles, palace servants, royal relatives) that were involved in the reported machinations. I assumed that a relational approach can contribute to the understanding of narrative sources, and the two main questions that I expected to answer were: 1) How can one extract relational data and construct networks that visualise and represent the information contained in a narrative source such as the Liber de Regno Sicilie? And 2) what do the networks thus constructed tell us about the significance and implications of the social space constructed by an author such as ‘Hugo Falcandus’?
The challenge of how to ‘read’ the text hence became the main focus of my research. In order to focus on the information on social and political processes embedded in the text, I needed to transform Ps.-Falcandus’ rhetoricised periods into a relational dataset; it was necessary to place the relations, not the individuals, at the centre of the study. The first requirement of such an attempt was to present the process of translating a textual structure into a sociological construct, namely, a socio-relational dataset. After the whole Liber de Regno Sicilie was rewritten through Franzosi’s Quantitative Narrative Analysis, I obtained a dataset that divides the social information embedded in the narrative into 420 events. The total number of attested social interactions, coded as semantic triplets, is 1174, together with 89 social relationships also explicitly attested in the narrative. Each interaction and relationship defines an edge that connects two characters. The dataset thus provides a series of narrative sociomatrices ready to be parsed through network analytical tools. Although not all the resulting measures proved to be useful or provided interesting insights for understanding the Liber’s implications, the overall results are a valuable addition to the perspective of the source, and are particularly useful for providing more nuanced images of the historical text. Measures of centrality and prestige proved useful when exploring only the narrative interactions of influence and communication within the royal court. Furthermore, blockmodelling turned out to be a promising approach for understanding the entire text’s social dimensions, for the structurally equivalent positions strongly suggest the narrative roles used by the author for constructing a social system.