NEWS: ERC Consolidator Grant for Professor Stefania Gialdroni (Roma Tre)

 

(Source: Venetian Cat)

We learned that Professor Stefania Gialdroni received an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project “Migrating Commercial Law and Language. Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11th-17th Century)”. The full list of ERC Consolidator Grants can be found here: https://erc.europa.eu/news/CoG-recipients-2020. Also see the Twitter hashtag #ERCCoG. Many congratulations to Professor Gialdroni!

 

Professor Gialdroni’s project

Title: Migrating Commercial Law and Language. Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11^th-17^th Century)

Acronym: MICOLL

Description:

 

MICOLL will analyze the development of commercial law by means of a tool almost ignored in this field: historical linguistics. The borrowing and transfer of legal terms will be carried out through a comprehensive and systematic investigation of medieval and early modern legal sources, in particular commercial letters, contracts and statutes. Even though legal historians tend to deny the effectiveness of a body of customary laws uniformly adopted across medieval and modern Europe, the “myth” of the ancient lex mercatoria continues to provide historical legitimacy to the supporters of corporate self-regulation. According to a widespread historiographical topos, merchants all over the world “spoke the same language” when it came to what was important for them: to make profits. As legal institutions are represented by technical legal words, an analysis of the terms merchants actually used is a powerful and never attempted way to verify the impact of merchants’ migrations on the development of commercial law, which had, in its turn, tremendous effects on social and economic history.

The center of this project will be Venice, for several centuries the mandatory stop for merchandise coming from the East and directed both to northern Europe and to Genoa, from where men and goods would reach other trading centers (e.g., France and the Iberian peninsula). Our time-frame spans from the “commercial revolution” of the 11^th century to the beginning of the modern period, when the new dynamics of transoceanic trade left Venice at the periphery of a world that was changing its very dimensions. 

Profile

Stefania Gialdroni is currently Assistant Professor in Medieval and Modern Legal History at the RomaTre University Law Department, where she teaches Medieval and Modern Legal History and The Legal Protection of Cultural Heritage.

She studied Law at the RomaTre University (JD equivalent) and she obtained a PhD both from the University of Milano-Bicocca and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), within the framework of the Marie Curie, 6th Framework Program of the European Commission (Doctorate in European Legal Cultures). As a PhD student she spent one year at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt a. M., one year at the London School of Economics and two years at the EHESS in Paris. She was post-doc research fellow at Arcadia University (The College of Global Studies, Rome Center), the University of Roma Tre, the University of Palermo and the University of Helsinki. She is the author of several articles on the history of commercial law and on “Law and the Humanities”. In 2011 she published the monograph “East India Company. Una storia giuridica (1600-1708)” (Bologna: Il Mulino) and in 2019 she co-edited the book “Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law. Trading Routes and the Development of Commercial Law” (Leiden/Boston: Brill).

 

stefania.gialdroni@uniroma3.it