Showcase

In order to test the prototype as it's being developed, we've documented the two procedures surrounding the beliefs of Anne Askew - her Heresy Inquest, and Heresy Trial. The two were very different procedures, the former a vestige of the medieval church's judicial system, while the later a new invention arising from Henry VIII's departure from allegiance to Rome with the establishment of a national church. The Inquest took place in the Court of the Bishop of London; the Trial, before Privy Council. The ways the two events are described and analyzed by historians, and how they appear in historical sources, details the way nanohistorical methods allow us to understand the two as legal processes, but also the historiography of Askew's torture and eventual burning at the stake in 1546.

Below are a series of visualizations of the Askew data. There are over 2950 nanohistories involved; they don't need to be represented as a network - there are other ways we can think about narrative, like putting the episodes into a sequence, or examiming the verbs used (which gives us a sense of how historians and sources 'characterize' an episode):

This example shows how Felicity Heal mentions and discusses various elements of the Reformation in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland in her 2000 monograph The Reformation in Britain and Ireland. We can trace what historical phenomena are regarded to be parts of others, and what these parts entail or how they're described by historians in her discussion.