The Florentine Consulte e Pratiche is the oldest recorded series of speech-by-speech policy discussion by political elites in European history, over one hundred and fifty years in length. This article is the first of an extended two-article sequence on political discussion in the Consulte e Pratiche, during the 1376–1378 period of the War of Eight Saints, which led up to the famous Ciompi Revolt. Our interest is in discovering both the semantic-network (article 1) and the factional-network (article 2) mechanics of this unexpected spillover from foreign-policy conflict into domestic revolt. Our central finding at the semantic level, in this first article, is that the spillover from war to revolution was mediated through the ceremonial and political-economy sides of religion.

The methodology in this first article is to uncover the evolving narrative-network structures exhibited in Florentine political discussion – namely, changing inter-correlations among keywords about topics, through chapters and subplots. “Narrative-network analysis” for us means (a) uncovering changing topological portraits of how subplots interlink through time, and (b) discovering interlocking linguistic “hinges” through which new historical trajectories of subplot combinations become defined. In our case, the linguistic hinges between foreign policy and domestic revolt were rooted in religion. How the evolving issues and topics discussed in this article express themselves in domestic (and eventually violent) political conflict between the anti-war Parte Guelfa faction and the pro-war Civic ‘faction’ will be the subject of the second of this complementary pair of articles.

佛罗伦萨咨询公司是欧洲历史上最古老的政治精英通过演讲进行的一系列演讲，记录了一百五十年。本文是《八圣战争》（1378–1378年）期间，《咨询》杂志政治讨论范围扩大的两篇文章的第一篇，这导致了著名的Ciompi起义。我们的兴趣在于发现这种从外交政策冲突到国内起义的意外溢出的语义网络（第1条）和派系网络（第2条）机制。在第一篇文章中，我们在语义层面上的主要发现是，战争到革命的溢出是通过宗教的礼仪和政治经济方面来进行的。

第一篇文章中的方法是揭示佛罗伦萨政治讨论中不断发展的叙事网络结构，即通过章节和子图来改变主题关键词之间的相互关系。对我们来说，“叙事网络分析”意味着（a）发现子图如何随着时间相互联系的变化的拓扑图，以及（b）发现通过互锁的语言“铰链”来定义子图组合的新历史轨迹。在我们的案例中，外交政策与国内起义之间的语言联系源于宗教。