ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways that Sarah Sophia Banks’s coin collection served to establish collecting networks among and between women in England during the eighteenth century, and how the exchanges of coins within these networks reflects a larger investment in the coinage and authority of the growing British empire. Held in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, two of Sarah Sophia’s manuscripts, ‘List of coins etc., Presents to me and of Duplicates that I have bought’, and ‘coins &c which I have given away’, include detailed acquisition lists of the coins she acquired and gave away to individuals. Through examining these lists, Hayes and Wills highlight a number of Sarah Sophia’s unique exchanges of coins with other women, specifically a woman named Maria Josepha Holroyd. Though it is difficult to trace the specific identities of the women listed in Sarah Sophia’s manuscripts due to a lack of first names listed in her coin acquisition lists, they read the potential identities and stories behind these exchanges within a larger network of women collectors of coins in the eighteenth century and consider the ways collecting networks like those created by Sarah Sophia could be acknowledged and better visualized today, using digital humanities methods in the afterlife of Sarah Sophia’s collection, such as social network analysis.
