Lead speed and nepotism in early modern ecclesiastical administration: A new quantitative approach

This article proposes two methods to analyze processual and social dynamics in early modern administration, based on thousands of digitally encoded records from the Vatican Archive concerning 17th-century ecclesiastical office provisions. The Roman Curia as the most wide-reaching center of premodern Church administration was largely bureaucratic and heavily reliant on patronage and nepotism. We introduce two quantitative metrics: ‘lead speed,’ relating spatial to temporal distances to measure administrative pace; and a ‘nepotism probability,’ using linguistic comparison of personal names and morphosyntactic markers in the sources within one appointment entry as an indicator of familial provision ties. Aggregating these metrics across thousands of administrative instances reveals evolving patterns of global governance in early modern Catholicism while underscoring the necessity of research into the comparability of locally embedded and possibly varying notions of kinship and distance on a continental or global scale. The article situates the methods historically and explains dataset construction and computational implementation, validates initial results, and shows how the metrics enable systematic analysis of administrative pace understood as efficiency and nepotistic dynamics within established historiographical debates.