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.

Wars have a tremendous impact on territories and their populations. Many cities were, at one point in their history, subjected to the grueling consequences of warfare. Some have suffered repeated assaults, successive cycles of destruction and reconstruction, displacement of population, and as a consequence, a remolding of their environment. Yet only a few large modern metropolis have gone through such cycles of sudden and thorough destruction, followed by periods of more or less rapid reconstruction, involving a massive regeneration of their populations. In this project, we plan to demonstrate that Shanghai represents an exceptional – though unfortunate -- case of an urban space that from the mid-19th century to the late 1940s was engulfed in several conflicts. The city can also claim the sad record of having been the first city in the world to be exposed to and ravaged by the most modern weaponry and to have suffered from heretofore unknown levels of violence. The history of Shanghai has been told from the angle of modernization, westernization, and astounding economic development. In other words, Shanghai appears in most narratives as a « success story ». A success indeed it was. And precisely, an even more astonishing success when one looks closely at the history of warfare and violence in the city. In this project, we argue that the development of Shanghai as an urban territory was conditioned by issues of defense and conflict. Shanghai thrived and prospered out of war. From the initial military foray and brief occupation by British troops in 1842 to the civil war (1945-49) and its ripples in post-war China, all through the civil rebellions (1853-55, 1860-61), revolutionary movements (1911, 1925-1927), and Sino-Japanese conflicts (1932, 1937), the city was the seat of forms of violence that affected both the spatial configuration, the distribution, composition and activities of the population, and the whole economic structure. This project proposes to explore the history of war and civilian violence in Shanghai over a long century (1842-1952) from the perspective of the spatial history and seeks to establish the determinants and modes of transformation the city that resulted from warfare. It sits at the interface of history and geography. The methodological approach to be adopted fits in the realm of "digital humanities", in particular digital history. It requires the collection and processing of both large amounts of quantitative and qualitative data, hence a four-year proposal, and the design and implementation of innovative instruments for historical research.

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.