Big Question: Triangulating Speech across Multiple Social Relations and Institutional Venues: Private Letters in Renaissance Florence

Principal Investigator: John Padgett, Political Science

Funding Type: Seed

Big Idea: This project on private letters in Renaissance Florence empirically develops the idea of “network autocatalysis” beyond its founding application domain of “chemical autocatalysis” (origins of life) and its extensions to “production autocatalysis” (emergence of markets) and “biographical autocatalysis” (emergence of organizational novelty) into the domain of “linguistic autocatalysis.” Padgett (2019) on Faulkner and the two forthcoming papers (2020) on Renaissance republican debate are also products of this extension of originally chemical ideas to language.