A decade ago I completed my MA in Medieval Studies. I was writing about social conditions in 11th century France. My professor recommended I use a historical technique that involved taking an inventory of all known residents in an area and analyzing their relationships.
The name of this methodology is insanely long (6+ syllables)and sounds like a medical procedure. I was fluent in Latin, but didn't recgnize any cognates except -ography.
Does any one know the name of this technique, or where I might find a list of historical techniques?
My question is probably too vague for a concrete answer, but could somebody point me towards an online resource? Googling "historical methodologies" isn't helpful.
Are you referring to prosopography?
That's basically the historical mode of analysis where you treat a group with common characteristics as a coherent whole that can be analyzed historically, usually because the group in question is comprised of persons for whom we cannot write individual biographies. This approach was very popular for a while among ancient and medieval historians because of the lack of source material for accessing personal lives.
While prosopographical approaches were considered a bit "old hat" for a while, they've had a slight resurgence in recent years. The best examples I know of are a bit a bit outside your time frame, but check out Tim Tackett's Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789-1790 for a theoretical model. Tackett takes the deputies of the National Assembly as a prosopographical unit and examines how they transformed from bourgeoisie into revolutionaries - a process that he claims required a collective experience and a common identity to be formed before it was possible. Another good example is Alan Spitzer's article "Malicious Memories: Restoration Politics and a Prosopography of Turncoats" in French Historical Studies, which examines the historical memory of the French Revolution during the Restoration and how different factions competed to establish a dominant interpretation of those events. Emma Rothschild is also currently working on a prosopography of French provincial nobles in the 18th century based on the model she established in The Inner Lives of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History, whose prosopographical unit was a Scottish family deeply involved in the British Empire abroad.