NETWORKS APPEAR TO be everywhere these days, not least in medieval history. Academic monographs and collections of essays now abound with titles like The Medieval Networks in East Central Europe (2018), Networks in the Medieval North (2023), Women's Networks in Medieval France (2016), and Contacts and Networks in the Baltic Sea Region (2019). An international research group called “Networks and Neighbours” has been active in the study of the late antique and early medieval periods for over a decade now. These developments are to be welcomed: they stem from a new appreciation, one ultimately grounded in the social sciences, that people are embedded in social networks and that this is an essential feature of the human condition. Further, the emergence of the internet and social media have fostered an understanding that people also engage constantly with networks of things, and that the material culture of the past, as well as the human agents, can and should be seen through this lens.

Our intellectual understanding of humans as “ultra-social” agents embedded in networks has a long pedigree in social psychology, sociology, and social anthropology. The concepts implicit in social network analysis ultimately trace their roots to the work of German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who parted with his contemporaries in arguing for the importance of small-scale, human interactions, over large-scale theories.

MATTHEW HAMMOND is currently Research Assistant at the University of Hull and has formerly been a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow and King's College London working on the People of Medieval Scotland 1093–1371 database (www.poms.ac.uk), as well as previously a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.