(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 (11th-17th 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 11th 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).
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