• PARISH RECORDS
• 1 - Overseers' accounts
• 2 - Vestry minutes
• 3 - Bastardy, settlement, apprenticeship
• 10 - Parish registers
• POOR LAW UNION
• 4 - Relieving officer's records
• 5 - Guardians' minutes
• 6 - Correspondence
• 7 - General ledger
• 8 - Rate books
• REGISTRAR GENERAL
• 9 - Census records

~ Paupers of the Cleobury Mortimer Union ~

What is a prosopography?	Map of the Union parishes	Record sources	Treatment of records	Query the database

What is a prosopography?

Used in its current context perhaps as early as 1743,^[1] [1] C. Nicolet, "Prosopographie et histoire sociale: Rome et Italie a l'époque républicaine," Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, no. 3 (1970), n. 3prosopography, is derived from the Greek προσωποποιία, in rhetoric, another word for personification.  There may well be many differing answers to this question, but perhaps the simplest way of describing it is "a series of factoids about the individuals encountered in a study and forming a distinct group". ^[2] [2] The term factoid, in this instance, was first used in the development of the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire to denote assertions that the researcher has made that a source states something about a person (John Bradley and Harold Short "Texts into Databases: The Evolving Field of New-Style Prosopography", Literary and Linguistic Computing, 20, Supplement (2005) p.8 [pp. 3-24]   As such, if structured in such a way that it can easily be searched, it provides a useful reference tool.  The potential of a prosopography is best realized though, when it is highly structured and maintained in the form of a relational database, which allows views from different, previously undefined, angles.

Prosopography is often described as collective biography, ^[3] [3] References are too numerous to cite. But it is listed as such in Charle, C. "Prosopography (Collective Biography)", International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes (eds), (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), pp12236-41, which also provides a list of other references but in the view of Katharine Keats-Rohan this is wrong: prosopography and collective biography, terms which are often conflated, are not the same thing.^[4] [4] Katharine Keats-Rohan, “Biography, Identity and Names: Understanding the Pursuit of the Individual in Prosopography” in K.S.B. Keats-Rohan (ed) Prosopography Approaches and Applications – A handbook, Prosopographica et Genealogica, vol 13, (Oxford, 2007) p.143 “Prosopography is about what the analysis of the sum of data about many individuals can tell us about the different types of connection between them, and hence about how they operated within and upon the institutions—social, political, legal, economic, intellectual—of their time."^[5] [5] Katharine Keats-Rohan, “Prosopography and Computing: A Marriage Made in Heaven”, History and Computing, 12, 1, (2000) p.2 [pp.1-11]

Writing in 1971, Lawrence Stone, in his seminal paper on the subject, suggested that prosopography would continue to develop as it was ‘ideally suited to the requirements of research papers and doctoral dissertations’.^[6] [6] Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedalus, 100, 1 (Historical Studies Today), 1971, p.71 Oddly, Stone dismissed this as a poor and irrelevant reason and then went on to justify its relevance. He also dismissed as irrelevant the advent of the computer. He may be forgiven that comment, as it would have been difficult at the time to foresee, or even imagine, the world in which we now live in which the computer plays such a significant part.  It is salutary, though, to realize that the year before Stone's article, Tedd Codd had published his paper on relational databases.^[7] [7] E.F. Codd "A relational model of data for large shared data banks". Communications of the ACM 13, (6), 1971, 377. doi:10.1145/362384.362685 

We are now in a position, thanks to the power of technology, to build ever larger and more detailed prosopographies which would have been inconceivable in Stone's day. Stone thought that computing may dictate the approach to be used in asking historical questions and the way in which they were answered. Quite the contrary: forty years later, it is a well-established discipline.  The advent of new technologies allows new questions to be asked.^[8] [8] Averil Cameron, “Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire”, Review (The British Academy), 4, p. 26 [pp.24-26]. Cameron chaired the committee of the Prosopography of the Byzantine World.

Whilst there are real concerns about the use of computing in history research, these should be confined to the impact of coding, which introduces a level of standardization of data, not present in the original source.^[9] [9] Kevin Schurer, “The Historical Researcher and Codes: Master and Slave or Slave and Master” in Mawdsley, E. et al (eds) ,History and computing. 3, Historians, computers and data : applications in research and teaching, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) p.11  But, the real advantage of a well-structured prosopography^[10] [10] Michele Pasin and John Bradley "Factoid-Based Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: Towards an Integrated Approach", Literary and Linguistic Computing (June 29, 2013) is that it allows the recorded factoids to be analyzed in the light of those questions and, most importantly, for relationships between the individuals to be uncovered, perhaps for the first time.

 

 

 

[1] C. Nicolet, "Prosopographie et histoire sociale: Rome et Italie a l'époque républicaine," Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, no. 3 (1970), n. 3

[2] The term factoid, in this instance, was first used in the development of the Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire to denote assertions that the researcher has made that a source states something about a person (John Bradley, and Harold Short, "Texts into Databases: The Evolving Field of New-Style Prosopography", Literary and Linguistic Computing, 20, Supplement (2005) p.8 [pp. 3-24]

[3] References are too numerous to cite. But it is listed as such in Charle, C. "Prosopography (Collective Biography)", International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes (eds), (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), pp12236-41 which also provides a listof other references

[4] Katharine Keats-Rohan, “Biography, Identity and Names: Understanding the Pursuit of the Individual in Prosopography” in K.S.B. Keats-Rohan (ed) Prosopography Approaches and Applications – A handbook, Prosopographica et Genealogica, vol 13, (Oxford, 2007) p.143

[5] Katharine Keats-Rohan, “Prosopography and Computing: A Marriage Made in Heaven”, History and Computing, 12, 1, (2000) p.2 [pp.1-11]

[6] Lawrence Stone, ‘Prosopography’, Daedalus, 100, 1 (Historical Studies Today), 1971, p.71

[7] E.F. Codd "A relational model of data for large shared data banks". Communications of the ACM 13, (6),  1970, 377. doi:10.1145/362384.362685

[8] Averil Cameron, “Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire”, Review (The British Academy), 4, p. 26 [pp.24-26]. Cameron chaired the committee of the Prosopography of the Byzantine World.

[9] Kevin Schurer, “The Historical Researcher and Codes: Master and Slave or Slave and Master” in Mawdsley, E. et al (eds) History and computing. 3, Historians, computers and data : applications in research and teaching, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) p.11

[10] Michele Pasin and John Bradley "Factoid-Based Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: Towards an Integrated Approach", Literary and Linguistic Computing (June 29, 2013)