The financial crisis of 2008 contributed to re-invigorating research in economic and financial history and revive, despite the relatively brief nature of the crisis, studies of markets over long periods. More recently, attacks against structures which have governed modern international commerce have thrown institutional studies into doubt and provoked questions about the very future of globalized markets. It is within this context of questions and doubts that the CoMOR project takes up the history of European fairs from the perspective of “market integrations”. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, fairs formed a system resting on a tightly organised schedule (“calendar of fairs”) which permitted merchants to meet in specific places on specific dates, known well in advance. At the same time, these fairs facilitated the interconnection between local and regional markets (rural as much as urban) and the transregional commercial networks. During the sixteenth century, a decoupling occured between merchandise and financial fairs linked to the shift from financing products to pure money markets. The chronological boundaries of the project have as such been chosen in order to best account for these major transformations: from the decline of the old fair systems at Champagne, around 1320, through a cycle dominated by the fairs at Lyon, to the triumph of the fairs at Besançon around 1630. The CoMOR project is particularly attached to studying the relational aspects (and their changes) of these merchant gatherings, the roles and the behaviours of the participants. For the first time, these exchanges will be mapped in their spatial and temporal dimensions through an integrated database and GIS tracing the merchants through their fairs, items, itineraries, and rhythms. This fundamental digital axis of the project will be brought to life by the French team with respect to Digital Humanities and the German team for Spatial Humanities. The investigation centers on France, Germany, and Italy, the specialties of the core consortium researchers, with, we hope and expect, expansions towards other economic and cultural regions near the end of the project. The Franco-German team in charge of CoMOR brings a number of specific advantages to the project. Most importantly, a complementary specialisation in different eras: French medievalists and early modernist Germans. This is followed by the shared closed focus on the project's main terrain, Southern Germany to Lyon, with both teams also counting among their members specialists in Northern Italy. Finally, while each team brings with it certain academic dispositions – in France, the strong emphasis on social history and sociology of economy, in Germany, a tradition of Handelsgeschichte, the history of finance and exchange – they share an ambition to contribute to the history of the European economy, rooted in the study of the integrating effects of fairs on economic and social patterns over the "longue durée".

The study of medieval preaching – and its main source, the sermon – offers a privileged insight into intellectual work and its techniques. This vast system of mass communication of the Church’s message and its values left a wealth of written traces, bearing witness to the ordinary, daily preaching that was offered throughout all of Christendom. Through this source, we can approach the persuasion strategies and also the tools used by the preachers in their intellectual work. Among those tools was the distinctio. This technique, extremely widespread in the Middle Ages from the late 12th c. onwards, consisted of considering a word according to its various senses, properties or characteristics, and supporting them with biblical citations. Distinctiones were a key ingredient of sermons from the early 13th c. onwards, just like exempla (short narratives used for persuasion), but contrary to the latter, distinctiones have never been studied in depth or even surveyed properly. The aim of the DISTINGUO project is to bridge this gap, first by developing a knowledge base and finding aid on medieval distinctiones in the context of preaching, laying the necessary foundation for a new field of study, and then by implementing a research programme exploring the use of distinctiones, their circulation, their link with exegesis, their mnemotechnic utilization, etc.

Archives of commercial and industrial firms are not often used by the economic historians of the 14th-17th centuries, because they are scattered all over Europe, difficult to read and understand, especially when the archives are vast and scholars are working in isolation. The ENPrESa project, which gathers 19 researchers (of which 6 are graduate and post-doc students) supported by 4 research institutes, aims to study the Salviati Archives, which are preserved in the library of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. This huge collection, with thousands of ledgers and hundreds of bundles, ranging from the late 14th to the 17th century, is still underused, as it holds a huge amount of information, collected in dozens of complete series of account-books. The project will be organized in 5 different inquiries during its 3 years. The first step will be a preliminary survey of the archive, in order to spot the pertinent series and records, and to create a database of the entrepreneurs and other individual actors. One particular line of inquiry, which will primarily be made on the records of the Lyons companies, will address bookkeeping norms and exchange practice. Beyond the issue of accounting, the main problem will be the European dynamics of trade and monetary circulation, which will be observed specifically from the point of view of money exchange from the 14th century onwards. Mapping European trade from the Salviati books will be the aim of the 2nd inquiry. 3 test periods have been selected: — 1440-1460 (records of the London, Bruges, Lisbon, Pisa and Florence companies). — 1490-1510 and 1540-1560 (Lyons, Pisa, Florence, Antwerp, Naples, Venice). Textile produce will be the subject of a general exploration, which ranges from the problems of production (the archives preserve the records of more than 30 different craft companies) to those of commercialisation. The research will focus on silk and wool cloth production, golden thread spinning, and dyeing. The trade of Mediterranean and southern products (silk thread, sugar, leathers, carpets, feathers, dyeing stuff), as it results from the records of the Lisbon and Constantinople ledgers, will be the matter of a last inquiry. This research has many aims. First, a complete analysis of the archives, with inventories and calendars of the most notable documents: letters, memories, technological treatises, etc. The second result will be a comprehensive description of the Salviati family business network, with a prosopographic study of the actors, men and women, managers, shareholders, partners, wage earners, clients. Only an approach such as this makes it possible to understand how family firms work: a network with hierarchical organization, a collection of loosely linked companies, or firms with competing or cooperative overlapping ownerships. A major incentive for this program was the extraordinary opportunity of gathering scholars of different generations, all experts in research on medieval and early modern commercial records, as a team for a coherent inquiry about different topics in a unique archive. Of real relevance will be the participation of post-doc and graduate students, who will apply for the two post-doc positions, develop greater knowledge and skills, and obtain academic distinction. Moreover, in the present period when teaching and research in pre-industrial economic history is at stake everywhere in universities across the world, the results of this project as a way of training young scholars will be at least as important as the acquisition of knowledge.

The project aims to study the way in which Bersuire, in the 14th century, translated Livy's History of Rome, a translation whose influence would be capital on the constitution of the French lexicon, political in particular, and the construction of a historical science, based on Western conceptions of Roman institutions. The team will also study the influence of this translation until the 16th century. and up to Spain and Italy. To carry out this large-scale study, it is first necessary to have access to the text of Bersuire, from which we have kept three Decades, i.e. groups of 10 books. The team will produce the critical edition, in digital version for decades III and IV. The recruitment of two doctoral students, guided by specialists in digital edition, will make it possible to carry out this essential step. Then specialists in literature, philology, lexicon, history, as well as two post-docs recruited within the framework of the project, will study the various fields considered.