This research project will take a new approach to the study of late-medieval writing practices by combining two fields of study: the governance of medieval states at the regional level and the cultural transfers between regions straddling two sides of a linguistic border. To explore these two strands, the project seeks to analyse the development of scripturality within two contexts: the geopolitical context of territorial principalities within the former Lotharingian space, on the border between the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire (the current Greater Region, Saar - Lor - Lux - Rhineland - Palatinate - Wallonia including the German speaking Community), and the cultural context of the onset of administrative writing and the progressive transition from Latin to the vernacular. The duchy of Lorraine and the county, later duchy, of Luxembourg are at the core of this project. A major part of the project will consist in the edition of princely charters from these two territories from the mid-thirteenth to the last quarter of the fourteenth century. The editorial project will be complemented by a study of the evolution of princely institutions in both principalities in the same period and up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the main objective of writing a socio-cultural and comparative institutional history. By combining the edition of texts with research on institutional questions comparative analysis and study of cultural transfers, our approach differs decisively from that of previous studies. It does so at three levels. First, our comparative approach for analysing cultural transfers will allow us to complement the internal history of the state by an external history, highlighting influences between states. Second, alongside the study of princely power proper, we will include the study of urban territorial powers as well as subordinate lordships (nobility, chivalry, monasteries) to determine their contribution in the formation of pre-modern states. Applying thus the concept of governance with its full meaning, our approach will be able to do justice to a range of political actors, whose ‘public’ character has been denied by most of traditional historiography. Third, the project will attach great importance to the symbolic representations of power, which includes coats of arms, seals and coins, genealogies, tombs, the use of vocabulary, diplomatic formulae and external features of charters, etc.). Likewise, the analysis will also encompass the material as well as the mental space of political communication, which not only includes the court, but also treaties, negotiations, and legal arbitrations. A central concept of this study is ‘scripturality’, i.e. the production and use of written documents: ‘writing’ and ‘counting’ are two key processes to govern, to manage land and people. Through their study, historians can explore the reality of medieval power. In their formal aspects, ‘writing’ and ‘counting’ are pervious to cultural transfers (origin of traditions, issues of ‘normalisation’ as a manifestation of the growing public administration, etc.). Far from being reduced to a fixed state of ‘texts’, they bring to light the protagonists and mediators (patrons, recipients, witnesses, scribes, messengers) of an active and complex, political and social communication, of which they carry an ideological discourse. From the perspective of administrative, institutional, and political written productions, the medieval area of today’s Greater Region with its political fragmentation and linguistic border represents one of the best cases to study cultural transfer processes in Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The project will provide a deeper understanding of the formation of regional identities – as such always multiple, dynamic, and open to intermutual influences – within the context of medieval statehood. This in turn will allow a better understanding of European culture in its diversity.