Before the advent of formal cartography and its emphasis on observation, accuracy, and reliance on global standards, the itinerary was the height of geographic knowledge. Lists of cities and their relative distances, represented by many national “miles” or eventually the location of postal waystations, opened European travel to a broad readership. By the mid seventeenth-century, private and public individuals had access to, and knowledge of, a wide network of mounted couriers and staging posts, connecting trade, travel, and epistolary exchange from the hubs of Milan, Venice, and Innsbruck to Constantinople, Madrid, and the New World. European postal networks were complex carrefours, bringing together merchants, pilgrims, tourists, and diplomats in both real and imagined space.

Digital spatial approaches often rely upon modern mapmaking and its assumptions of a decentered viewpoint, direct distances, and national boundaries. The application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to a corpus of 70 published itinerary books models the organizing logic of the itinerary genre and hierarchization of regions, cities and routes. While the pilgrimage path of St. James and transalpine commercial routes were widely republished, dynamic networks based on the dates of first and last publication indicate the influence of new postal hubs, sea travel, and cartography on early modern conceptions of a connected Europe. I develop dynamic cartograms, while adding new emphasis to their documentation of a contemporary mental map. A combination of spatial representation with Social Network Analysis (SNA) better recreates the early modern experience of space. Utilizing the SNA, TSNA, and networkDynamic packages in R, I construct and measure dynamic network models for comparison with spatial maps.