This project aims to study on a diachronic way (through Middle and Modern ages), the different original forms of Christianity that were to be found in the « border territories », located on political, religious and linguistic borders, i.e. the lotharingians territories, later on called during the Middle Ages the « inbetween lands » (from the North Sea to Savoy). This territories, along with the Milanese, formed the « catholic Ridge » during the modern era (the border of the catholic influence, between the Protestants in the east and the Catholics in the West). These specificities were asserted often by the historians, but rarely demonstrated, if it is not by case studies. The objective thus is to rethink the explanatory causes and the processes of such a multiplicity and variety of religious experiments, as well as their spread, their successes or failures, while highlighting more efficiently what is due to the circumstances and what is to be credited to the structural phenomenons, linked to the political and religious specificities of these regions. To cover this space and assure a really comparative and transverse approach, an international consortium with 7 historian research teams was established : 4 French teams (the CRULH of Lorraine – coordinator –, the LARHRA of Lyon, the LSH of Besançon, the CREHS of Arras) and 3 foreigners (Transitions of Liège, Institute of history of the University of Luxembourg, History Department of Università degli Studi of Milan). All in all, 37 people are committed in the project, which concerns essentially the history but also assures openings towards the art history and the musicology, to deal with the evolution of the liturgical practices : 12 medievalists, 21 modernists, 2 art historians, 2 musicologists. Given the tremendous size of the region and of the period to be studied, the project will focus on a comparative study of three main topics, by using in particular the methods of the historic anthropology, the gender studies, the prosopography : • The commitment of religious women (specificity of the feminine vocations ; the relations with the male management of the churches ; the feminine writings) : organization of three rounds tables and a final colloquium, with publication of the acts in the form of common synthesis ; three volumes of editions of texts ; on-line publishing and digitalizations of texts ; constitution of a database on these communities. • The pastoral models (episcopal models, formation and skills of the bishops, the organization of the diocesan staff, the legal or liturgical norms’ production, « clericalization » of the Protestant ministers) : organization of three round tables and a final colloquium with publication of the acts ; constitution of a prosopographical database on the episcopal staff (14th-17th c.). • Devotions and politics (promotion and spread of the devotional practices : specific ways of the Marian worship, « political » saints, specific devotion to the angels) : organization of two round tables and a final colloquium with publication of the acts ; one exhibition with realization of a catalog (Museum of sacred art from Fourvière in Lyon) ; on-line edition of an inventory of the editions of a devotion book, "best-seller" during two centuries in the considered region. All the works will give rise to the production of a web site and a global synthesis in the form of a book-atlas, which will contain hundred maps accompanied with long recapitulative notes and with iconography.

With the creation of a new database my project aims to transform the scope of analysis of the art markets studies which to this day address only partial aspects, focusing on the market for paintings or “fine arts”. In fact the art market is vast and consists in great part in the sale of objects. To develop a global approach, inclusive of objects, I propose to build-up a specifically designed database, accessible on the internet. It would provide new data, from archives unexplored to this day, compiled with other scattered sources, opening to new perspectives of research scholars world-wide, bringing interdisciplinary studies through art history. Art market history is an essential addition to art history, opening up to interdisciplinary studies, crossing art with economics, urban, social history and sociology. Investigating trajectories of works, construction of price and dynamics of circulation are central in these studies and now digital methods have developed, they transform the scope of analysis. As such, the French project ARTL@S created BASART and GEOMAP to examine the channels and networks that make up the market for fine arts. Founded in the1980s The Getty Provenance Index is the pioneering database to research the history of individual works through the European market and across time (prices, collectors, dealers, provenance) but, again, it is limited to pictures and nothing comparable has been done for other artistic objects, designated as decorative arts. Separating the data relative to the pictures’ sales from other goods has been detrimental to the history of taste and the history of art. This database will be a new instrument to explore markets and trajectory of objects such as furniture, ceramics, clocks etc. over a long time period (1700-2000). It will be built for specific searches on objects / sales / sellers / buyers / places to answer questions relative to provenance, circulation, collections, expertise and trade, but also to offer broader analysis and global perspective on the market. It will be incomparable to the scattered pieces of information found in publications and will have a great impact on future scholarly research in the fields. The data will be input from historic auction sales over a long period (1700-2000), in cross-referencing auction catalogues and auction records and archives. The first core of the data will come from the unexploited handwritten sales reports of the Parisian auctioneers, preserved in the Archives de Paris. It is a vast and homogeneous source specific to France, allowing for both quantitative and qualitative analysis over a long period. It will be supplemented by sources from other international sales, held in London or New York for example. International museums will be able to use it to research their collections and find provenance across time. For example, facing the present problems of restitution, it could be used to find the circulation of objects during the Nazi Occupation period. The accessibility of the data will have an impact on research across historical disciplines (economics, sociology, gender studies, trade etc.). Moreover, it will be a groundbreaking contribution in the history of European collections but also to explore the worldwide expansion of the market in the 19th-20th centuries. It will expose the mechanisms of the trade and the persisting problems of regulation. The database will form a groundbreaking model for future research, with the aim to be built-up with international sources. It will have to be interoperable with the Getty Index for example. Consultation with engineers and research teams from various institutions will be necessary and an international scientific committee will be created, to encourage international collaborations. The extent of the data input and the expertise needed to model the database require the ERC Starting Grant, to appoint a team involved in the project for 5 years after a period of preparation during the post-doc.

The project “La fabrique de l’histoire telle qu’elle se raconte” (the making of History as it tells itself), also known as HISTINÉRAIRES, , has for object the study of the “mémoires de synthèse des activités scientifiques” of the habilitation (HDR) to supervise research submitted in history departments since the early 90s’ to 2010. This yet unexploited material, different from the “travail inédit” which is often published and from the article collection, has become a treasure trove of information about the contemporary historical community. Its examination will enable the establishment of a new sociology of the profession as well as a renewal of contemporary French historiography and its developments, no longer based on the writings of a few well known historians but rooted in a generation’s research paths. It roots from the growing importance of reflexivity among the historian community and relies on the findings of sociology and the history of sciences. The first objective of the project will be to sketch a group portrait of the present-day researchers in history through an analysis of the institutional and intellectual paths. Among the institutional aspects, will be accounted for: the academic path, the time spent teaching in the secondary cycle, the place where the viva was held, the age and gender of the candidate, the members of the jury, the future of the candidate… For the intellectual aspects, data on the volume of production at the time of the viva, the theoretical references made (to social sciences or philosophy), the connections with foreign historiography, the evolution of themes and approaches of research, the inscription into a specific field (cultural history, economical history, social history…), the participation to current historiographical debates, the involvement in community life (answers to the “social demands”, diffusion of knowledge) will be collected. This information will be treated through cartographic and quantitative tools, enabling the establishment of geographical mappings of research and its structuring networks. The second part of the project will investigate how historians interpret their exercise of synthetizing their scientific activities. Whereas some chose to provide a long resume of their accomplishments, others analyzed their personal relationship to the histories they make by sometimes integrating Pierre Nora’s auto-reflexive problematic, which started with his Essais d’ego-histoire. This investigation will reveal the evolution of a still roughly defined exercise. As with the historiographical and/or epistemological debates, the treatment of the data will mostly be qualitative while integrating discourse analyses. This corpus will first be completed and enlightened by oral interviews of HDR tutors, and with a study of its genesis, on April 5th 1988 with the decree on the habilitation to supervise research. The global aim of the project will be to establisha groundbreakingcartography of the community, which would rely on the writings of its members. It is a project of a historiography from below, to use a common term nowadays. From this point of view, the writings’ subjectivity present through the academic canvas, far from being a handicap, will inform research on various institutional and intellectual strategies in action.

This historical research programme analyses the interactions between an institution and a practice: on the one hand, marriage, a sacrament of the Church and a crucial step in setting up as a professional, transmitting property and integrating society; on the other, mobility, understood in both spatial and social terms. This programme’s field of study is modern Venice, which was both a very large city of more than 150,000 inhabitants at the end of the 16th century, and a world-city whose mixed population came from around the Mediterranean basin and the Transalpine countries. Venice is therefore an excellent vantage point for studying interconfessional marriages (between Catholics and Orthodox), marriages between foreigners, and marriages between natives and immigrants. This project relies on a massive volume of documentation: the processetti matrimoniali. These enquiries were made by the Catholic Church to ensure that future spouses were indeed either single or widowed. Initially, these enquiries were carried out for all individuals whose marital status was in doubt, especially non-native Venetians. They were based on witness testimony, and recorded in 340 registries between 1592 and 1807. This serial and diachronic documentation will be used to create a collaborative database developed using a project hosting platform (symoghi.com) with support from the Digital History Unit of LARHRA. The database input will consist of one-third of the processetti collection (120 registries, i.e. around 10,000 enquiries). This unique documentation will be processed in two ways. Firstly, the processetti will be studied as the central component of a system that the Catholic Church set up in an attempt to reconcile human mobility with the respect of marriage rules. The analysis of this process will be expanded to the Italian peninsula and to the Greek world under Venetian dominion in order to gain a better understanding of the circulation of ecclesiastical norms and practices. Then, we will regard the processetti as a source of information for grasping marriage as a pivotal moment in a migratory trajectory and an integration process. The processetti lend themselves to both a quantitative and qualitative approach that enables a full range of migratory trajectories to be reconstructed, including for example migrations by women (who leave little trace in the sources typically used for research). Lastly, we will examine how, at the end of a migratory trajectory, marriage could be an instrument for social integration (by looking at the significance of exogamous and interfconfessional marriages) – and for social mobility (paying special attention to the sequence of events surrounding the 1630 plague outbreak, which appears to have opened up matrimonial and economic opportunities). This research programme aims to better understand what inclusion and social mobility mean in an open, cosmopolitan city that is still affected by legal, religious and social barriers. This project is underpinned by a partnership between LARHRA-University of Lyon 2, the University of Padua, the French Schools of Rome and Athens, and the National University of Athens.

In Europe, the history of urban and suburban populations between the end of the 19th century and the Second World War is poorly known even though it was a time of profound transformation, largely linked to industrialisation and urbanisation. In France, historical demography has, until now, largely focused on the 1750–1830 period and especially on villages. Cities are less well understood, and even less their suburbs, because the size of their populations makes data collection time-consuming. With their very wide variety of populations, Paris and its suburbs offer an ideal setting to undesrtand better the rise of love marriages, the increase in divorce, and major changes in gender relations between 1880 and 1940 that seem to appear first in large cities. Thanks to a collaboration with specialists in machine learning, the EXO-POPP project will develop a database of 300,000 marriage certificates from Paris and its suburbs between 1880 and 1940. These marriage certificates provide a wealth of information about the bride and groom, their parents and their marriage witnesses, that will be analysed from a host of new angles made possible by the new dataset. These studies of marriage, divorce, kinship and social networks covering a span 60 years will also intersect with transversal issues such as gender, class and origin. The geolocation of data will provide a rare opportunity to work on places and relocations within the city, and linkage with two other databases will make it possible to follow people from birth to death. Building such a database by hand would take at least 50,000 hours of work. But, thanks to the recent developments in deep learning and machine learning, it is now possible to construct huge databases with automated reading systems including handwriting recognition and natural language understanding. Indeed, because of these recent advances, optical printed named entity recognition (OP-NER) is now perfoming very well when analysing regular texts such as financial yearbooks and old newspapers, and similar performance is now expected with printed marriage certificates from 1923 to 1940. On the other hand, while handwriting recognition by machine has become a reality, also thanks to deep learning, optical handwritten named entity recognition (OH-NER) has not received much attention. OH-NER is expected to achieve promising results on handwritten marriage certificates dating from 1880 to 1922. This project’s research questions will focus on the best strategies for word disambiguation for handwritten named entity recognition. We will explore end-to-end deep learning architectures for OH-NER, writer adaptation of the recognition system, and named entity disambiguation by exploiting the French mortality database (INSEE) and the French POPP database. An additional benefit of this study is that a unique and very large dataset of handwritten material for named entity recognition will be built. The EXO-POPP dataset will be a rich new asset in the field. In addition to its major contribution toward better understanding of research questions about marriage, migration, family and friend networks, divorce and separation, among many others, between 1880 and 1940, the EXO-POPP project will foster new collaborations between computer scientists and researchers in the humanities and social sciences to improve the recognition and the optic of characters and handwriting, which are now essential to provide valuable new tools for the processing of data sources, especially historical ones.