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	Prosopography	Quantitative Prosopography
Ämnesområde	Social History	Social History
Familj	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Ursprungsår	1971	1971
Upphovsperson	Lawrence Stone; Lewis Namier; Charles Beard	Lawrence Stone (programmatic statement); roots in Lewis Namier and Ronald Syme
Typ	qualitative-quantitative collective method	network-tabular
Ursprungskälla	Stone, L. (1971). Prosopography. Daedalus, 100(1), 46-79.	Abramitzky, R., Boustan, L., Eriksson, K., Feigenbaum, J., & Perez, S. (2021). Automated Linking of Historical Data. Journal of Economic Literature, 59(3), 865-918.
Alias	Collective Biography, Prosopography, Group Biography, Multiple Career Analysis	Collective biography, Prosopographical network analysis, Large-scale biographical databases, Career-sequence prosopography
Närliggande	4	3
Sammanfattning	Prosopography, or collective biography, is the investigation of the common characteristics of a defined group of historical individuals by means of a uniform set of questions, asked of every member, about their birth, family, education, wealth, careers, office-holding, and connections. Lawrence Stone, whose 1971 essay Prosopography is the field's classic methodological statement, defined it precisely as the study of a population through a collective study of their lives. Rather than writing the biography of one notable figure, the prosopographer treats many lesser-known lives as a dataset, seeking the patterns, the typical paths into an elite, the marriage strategies of a class, the recruitment of an administration, that no single biography could reveal. The method has two great traditions: the study of small, well-documented elites, exemplified by Lewis Namier's analysis of eighteenth-century members of Parliament, and the study of larger, more anonymous populations to map social structure and mobility. It transforms scattered biographical fragments into systematic knowledge of social composition and power.	Quantitative prosopography studies a historical group by investigating the common characteristics of its members through a collective analysis of their lives. Rather than writing one biography, the prosopographer defines a population, members of a parliament, a senate, a profession, a religious order, and poses a uniform set of questions to each life: social origins, education, marriage and kin, offices held, wealth, career path. The answers, encoded as structured data, are then analysed statistically and, increasingly, as networks, mapping the kinship, patronage, and office-holding ties that bound the group together. Programmatically articulated by Lawrence Stone and rooted in the work of Namier on Parliament and Syme on the Roman aristocracy, the method turns scattered biographical detail into comparable variables and relational graphs. In its modern, database-driven form it joins large biographical datasets to network analysis and statistics, illuminating how elites recruited, reproduced, and governed.