VACANCY: 30 month Postdoctoral researcher in Legal History (ERC Consolidator Grant IsThisFrench) (Bordeaux: Université de Bordeaux) [DEADLINE 16 APR 2026]

 

(image source: Université de Bordeaux)

Abstract:

The aim of this research project, led by Professor Xavier Prévost, is to place Renaissance Legal humanism in its European context in order to understand the construction of legal nationalisms hidden behind the expression “French method of teaching law” (mos gallicus jura docendi). The recruited researcher will work in close collaboration with the principal investigator and the engineer in digital humanities. The initial task will be to populate a historiographical database, followed by the drafting of two articles on the links between Legal humanism and French legal nationalism.

Read more here. 

DATABASE: ERC Consolidator Grant "Pamphlets and Patrons"

(image source: PaPa Uni Trier)

The ERC Consolidator Grant "Pamphlets and Patrons. How Courtiers Shaped the Public Sphere in Ancien Regime France" (PI: Damien Tricoire, Universität Trier), awarded in the 2020 call, launched a database. The database allows to identify actors based on their links with a legal profession (e.g. avocat, procureur), and much more.

Description:

Pamphlets and Patrons: How Courtiers shaped the Public Sphere in Ancien Régime France

Welcome to the Pamphlets and Patrons (PaPa) database! This database was created as part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) (2021–2026), carried out at the Department of History of the University of Trier under the direction of Damien Tricoire. We provide data on French intellectual and political elites as well as on eighteenth-century prints.

The project explores how the public sphere, and particularly unauthorised political literature, was shaped by interdependencies and collaborations between aristocrats, authorities, authors and printers in the eighteenth century. It focuses on influential networks, in particular on the patron-client relationships linking members of the court nobility with writers.

 

Collaboration with the MPCE project (Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment) 

The PaPa team collaborated intensively with Simon Burrows (Western Sydney University, Australia) and his MPCE project (Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment).

This collaboration allowed the PaPa team to build upon the extensive data assembled by Simon Burrows and his team over nearly two decades. As a result, the database contains a large amount of information on printers, booksellers, translators, editors, and authors.

It also includes extensive data on books and their editions, such as information on print runs, inspections, confiscations, licensing applications and decisions, and the type of authorisation granted for publication.

Through this cooperation, Simon Burrows’ database, originally designed to measure the diffusion of prints by examining the book trade and evidence of book circulation created by policing institutions, now also includes data related to networks that influenced print culture. We have placed a special emphasis on entering data about relationships between persons, that is kinship, friendship, patronage, membership in societies, among others.

For a complete list of the sources used by the PaPa database, please consult the Sources section of this website.

For a full list of publications produced by the PaPa project, please see the Publications page of the project website.

For more information about the MPCE (Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment) project, please consult Simon Burrows’ project project website.

 

How to use this database

Persons

You can explore individuals involved in print production, diffusion, and policing, as well as connected with the French court.

Users may browse:

• individual persons or groups of persons (societies)

• professional groups or economic sectors

• types of occupations

Network visualisation tools allow users to explore connections between actors within the court and the world of print. You may combine the networks of different persons.

Works (books and editions)

Users can browse printed works:

• by title

• by genre

• by author

• by editor, translator, or other contributors

Book Policy and Policing

The database records actions taken regarding printed works and editions, including:

• actions by printers or booksellers (such as print runs or applications for licenses)

• actions by French authorities (such as inspections, confiscations and licensing decisions

Patronage and Protection

Users can explore how influential individuals gave resources (e. g. money) to writers, and how they recommended the authors to the authorities.

 

How to cite this database

Please use the following citation form to quote the database:

Damien Tricoire, Benoît Carré, Simon Dagenais, Nele Dentinger, Pamphlets and Patrons database, 2026, https://heurist.huma-num.fr/MPCE_Mapping_Print_Charting_Enlightenment/web/220687?ver=2, [date accessed].

 

License

Except where otherwise noted, all content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial International 4.0 Licence  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/  

 

Contributors

Such a work would not have been possible without the work of many researchers and research assistants.

We are grateful to the work done by Simon Burrows and his team from Leeds University and then in Western Sydney University, who added data for almost two decades. We are especially thankful to Hamish Graham, who entered data regarding censors as well as permissions tacites.

We would like to aknowledge the work done by researchers and research assistants on the Pamhlets and Patrons database:

• Pamphlets and Patrons team: Damien Tricoire, Benoît Carré, Simon Dagenais, Nele Dentinger, Miranda Kam
• Research assistants who gathered data in the Archives nationales (Paris): Benjamin Alvarez Araujo, Juliette Eyméoud and Julie Özcan
• Student research assistants from the University of Trier who entered data into Heurist: Cassandra Dostert, Ivo Köth, Nils Rath, Luke Ströhla, Tom Strauch, Sarah Wieland, Felix Wójcik and Ian Wolff

We would like to acknowledge the work done by the Heurist team, who helped us in the conception of the database (especially Ian Johnson and Michael Falk), as well as the team members who helped us to conceive the website of our database (especially Ian Johnson and Brandon McKay).

 

About Heurist

Heurist is a free, flexible, open-source (on gitHub) data management application and website builder specifically designed for researchers in the Humanities. It was developed at the University of Sydney from 2005 - 2015, and since then as a non-profit project, under the direction of Dr Ian Johnson. Its design has been informed by the needs of hundreds of research projects. It is now maintained by the non-profit association , based in Paris.

Heurist is available as free, non-commercial web services available to researchers worldwide. Please visit HeuristNetwork.org to find a service in your region.

Heurist allows researchers to design, build, analyse, visualise, publish (via the web) and archive their own databases without coding or technical support, including the automatic generation of a 'vanilla' website which can be used as-is or customised extensively to fit a specific graphic design. Websites are edited through the Heurist website editor, stored as an integral part of the database and generated directly by the Heurist software. This allows for reliability and sustainability, and for optimal interaction with the data including images, and the use of Heurist's interface components (widgets such as facet searches, result lists, maps, timelines, custom reports and network diagrams) directly in the website.

The development team provides support to all Heurist users, including free email support and bug fixing for unfunded projects and consultancy services for database modelling, database construction, conversion of existing databases and websites, code development, website construction and training. Heurist is entirely non-profit; consultancy work provides the funding required to run the project.

See database here: Damien Tricoire, Benoît Carré, Simon Dagenais, Nele Dentinger, Pamphlets and Patrons database, 2026, https://heurist.huma-num.fr/MPCE_Mapping_Print_Charting_Enlightenment/web/220687?ver=2.

More information on the project on its website.

SEMINAR: PetrIUS and Printed Canon Law Paratexts up to ca. 1600 (Poznań: Centre for Ius Commune, Adam Mickiewicz University, 24 FEB 2026 - 11:00 CET, online)

(Source: Liber extra, edition of Paris 1499, Basel University Library, Nn III 10)

The Centre for Ius Commune has been established at Adam Mickiewicz University to implement the ERC Starting Grant PetrIUS: Petrification of ius commune through printed paratexts led by Piotr Alexandrowicz. The project aims to trace the origins, evolution, and consolidation of marginalia (paratexts) added to printed editions of the Roman and canon law sources. By examining their variations and significance, the project will demonstrate how paratexts shaped the interpretation of Roman and canon law in the early modern period and determine whether the printed marginalia influenced the legal education and practice. More information on the project can be found here: link.

The Centre will also host events related to ongoing research and to broader topics concerning late medieval and early modern ius commune. In the first meeting Piotr Alexandrowicz will talk in general about the project and the first observations on the development of canon law printed paratexts. The meeting will be held on Tuesday, 24.02.2026 at 11 am CET. It will be organised in a hybrid format; to join online use the link to the MS Teams: link.

The Centre welcomes collaboration with scholars working on late medieval and early modern ius commune. If you want to learn more about the Centre or contact the Centre do not hesitate to email the team members Piotr Alexandrowicz (piotr.alexandrowicz@amu.edu.pl) or Matthew Cleary (matthew.cleary@amu.edu.pl).

FILM: "Le Vie dell'Acqua" - ERC PROJECT "MICOLL" - Università di Padova

(Source: Micoll) Il film "Le vie dell'acqua" (progetto ERC MICOLL) tra didattica e terza missione Il film "Le vie dell’acqua", diretto da Fabio Masi e prodotto da Growing Production, presentato in anteprima il 5 settembre 2025 nell’ambito della 82ª Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, è uno degli output del progetto ERC CoG MICOLL – "Migrating Commercial Law and Language. Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11th–17th Centuries)" - https://micoll-erc.eu-, ideato e diretto dalla prof.ssa Stefania Gialdroni (Università di Padova) Si tratta di un prodotto che nasce dalla contaminazione tra ricerca storica e fiction contemporanea. Ambientato tra Padova e Venezia, il film segue un gruppo di studenti dell’ultimo anno di liceo alle prese con un progetto scolastico che si trasforma in un viaggio personale e collettivo. Tra lezioni, prove teatrali e scoperte storiche, la narrazione intreccia cultura, emozioni e riflessioni sull’identità, avvicinando un pubblico giovane ai temi della ricerca scientifica. Il film costituisce il primo step di un format didattico-scientifico innovativo, articolato in tre livelli: Un film per stimolare curiosità e partecipazione; Interviste integrali agli studiosi coinvolti; Una pubblicazione scientifica con la trascrizione delle interviste (tradotte in inglese), un’introduzione critica e una bibliografia. Tutti i materiali saranno liberamente accessibili online, come previsto dalle politiche di open science dell’ERC, e potranno essere utilizzati per giornate di studio, proiezioni e incontri con il pubblico, in Italia e all’estero. Un esempio concreto di didattica innovativa, terza missione e public engagement, in cui la storia del diritto incontra il linguaggio del cinema. ERC Consolidator Grant MICOLL: "Migrating Commercial Law and Language. Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11th-17th Cent.)" - PI Prof. Stefania Gialdroni - Link project: https://www.micoll-erc.eu.                                                                                     Link trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltP94OaeBuQ Link interviste: https://www.youtube.com/@micollerc6082

JOB: Postdoc position in history of ius commune (Poznan: Adam Mickiewicz University, DEADLINE: 13 October 2025)

The Centre for Ius Commune at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan, Poland) is seeking a Postdoctoral Researcher for the ERC Starting Grant project "PetrIUS: Petrification of ius commune through printed paratexts".

Between the 1460s and 1620s, printed editions of canon and civil law texts witnessed a constant development of marginal paratexts, such as glosses, summaries, cases or commentaries. They were added to authoritative legal sources because the printers were interested in improving the quality and attractiveness of new source editions. They often hired legal experts who offered them new tools, resources, and ideas. These were incorporated into printed books using new printing techniques. In consequence, the dynamic between improved new editions and advances in printing enterprise fueled the ongoing development of printed legal books. Various questions concerning the origin, transmission, and influence of paratexts are embedded in the interplay between sources and marginalia, manuscripts and printing, editors and printers, and books and their readers. PetrIUS has an innovative approach for shifting the focus from source (text) to marginalia (paratexts). PetrIUS aims to examine how print and its evolution helped to petrify – that is, consolidate – landmark achievements of late medieval ius commune. This is done by enabling some doctrinal accounts to be transferred into marginalia of source editions. The novelty brought about by print affected legal science and communication. PetrIUS will acknowledge how legal experts employed novel technical tools to transfer the heritage of medieval law into early modern source editions and how these processes affected patterns of scientific work and the transfer of knowledge in academia. To do so, PetrIUS will implement typical legal and book history tools as well as natural language processing techniques. The latter enables detailed comparisons between paratexts’ printed editions and their reception in the scholarly literature. The research will conclude with a legal theoretical study that assesses the early modern significance of paratexts by treating them as the media of law, that is, the means of legal communication.

The postdoctoral researcher will contribute to the implementation of the project by studying the printed paratexts of the corpus iuris civilis. Their work will focus primarily on two main work packages related to these printed paratexts: classification of types and functions of paratexts added to printed corpora iuris (WP1) and petrification of late medieval ius commune taking the form of printed paratexts in corpora iuris (WP5).

This is a full-time position for 45 months (including 6 months probation period) starting December 2025.

For more information on the call and on the project do not hesitate to contact the project PI, Piotr Alexandrowicz (piotr.alexandrowicz[at]amu.edu.pl).

More information on the call can be found here.

JOB: PhD Studentship: Insurgent Temporalities: Fascism as a Global Anti-Universalist Project (Maynooth: Maynooth University, DEADLINE 25 JUL 2025)

 

(image source: jobs ac uk)

Abstract:

Prof. Raul Cârstocea has been awarded an European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for a project entitled Insurgent Temporalities: Fascism as a Global Anti-Universalist Project (INTEMPO). As part of this project, the Department of History at Maynooth University is pleased to announce that two PhD Scholarships are available for suitably qualified applicants intending to commence their PhD studies in September 2025 / January 2026.

Project description:

Insurgent Temporalities: Fascism as a Global Anti-Universalist Project (INTEMPO) is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant 2024 scheme of Horizon Europe, grant number no. 101170033. Led by Prof. Raul Cârstocea (Principal Investigator), the project investigates the global spread of fascism during the interwar period, particularly with a view to the transnational connections established by fascist movements and regimes. INTEMPO hypothesises that, despite their national specificities, fascist movements and regimes around the world recognised their commonalities and drew inspiration from, as well as engaged with, like-minded activists abroad. It argues that, while the significant differences between fascist organisations were a consequence of different national pasts in diverse contexts, fascists shared a common vision of a future ‘New Order’ that allowed them to see themselves as part of a European or, indeed, global fascist moment. This hypothesis will be tested against a number of case studies of fascist movements, within and outside of Europe, through archive-based research into their ideology and practices.

Read more here. 

VACANCY: Two fully-funded PhD-positions: Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750 (St Andrews: University of St Andrews/ERC, DEADLINE 15 MARCH 2024)

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Two fully funded PhD studentships are available at the University of St Andrews to work as part of the ERC-selected/UKRI-funded project ‘Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750’, under the supervision of the Principal Investigator, Dr Arthur der Weduwen. The project investigates how law was communicated in early modern Europe (c. 1500-1750), and what impact this had on European society.

The PhD studentships will begin in September 2024, will be based in the School of History at the University of St Andrews (with significant periods to be spent on research abroad), and will last for four years. 

These PhD studentships offer the successful applicants the exciting prospect of combining the pursuit of an independently researched thesis exploring a particular dimension of legal and political communication in early modern Europe with the opportunity to work collaboratively within a research team and to contribute to co-authored publications and the organisation of scholarly conferences.

The ‘Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750’ project has been awarded a grant of €1.4 million by the European Research Council and is funded as part of the UKRI’s Frontier Research Guarantee scheme.  It will run for five years, from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2028, and is led by the Principal Investigator, Dr Arthur der Weduwen.

The COMLAWEU project is the first to investigate comparatively how law was communicated to citizens and subjects by the authorities in early modern Europe (1500-1750). It pursues an original comparative study of the publication and circulation of municipal, regional and national law, encompassing oral communication, ceremonial proclamations and the employment of criers, as well as the affixing, distribution and sale of law texts, in manuscript and printed form.

Based on extensive archival research, this project will seek to establish for the first time to what extent the increasing body of law that was issued in early modern Europe was made publicly available, and in what forms.

The project seeks to add a new and much-needed perspective to the study of European politics in a critical era of state formation, framing the communication of law as an essential stabilising factor in an era of highly participatory but undemocratic politics.

This project will offer multiple comparative frameworks through which the communication of law will be studied, including Protestant and Catholic states, urban and rural areas, and empires, national kingdoms and city-states.

With the aid of such a comparative lens, it is an overarching aim of the project to analyse how the public dissemination of law shaped early modern civic society and influenced political participation and accountability.

The project team, led by the PI and comprising two postdoctoral research assistants and two PhD students, will work collaboratively, using a series of comparative case studies based on European regions to explore and reveal the complex ways in which European authorities communicated with their citizens and subjects.

Further details about this opportunity can be found on the School of History postgraduate funding page.

NEWS: ERC Consolidator Grant (CaPANES Project – Prof. D. De ruysscher)

 

We learned that the European Research Council has recently decided to fund the CaPANES-project (ERC Consolidator Grant) by Professor D. De Ruysscher.

On 17 March 2022, the European Research Council announced its decision to fund the CaPANES-project. This project is an ERC Consolidator Grant of Prof. Dave De ruysscher, who previously, in 2016, obtained an ERC Starting Grant. The ERC Consolidator Grant is funded for the amount of 1.9 million EUR. The CaPANES-project (Causal Pattern Analysis of Economic Sovereignty), which will last five years, will analyze the legal concept of economic sovereignty from a historical perspective. The present-day notion of sovereignty of states does not adequately capture foreign trade relations, networks or economic clout. These shortcomings have resulted from a historical reduction of the meaning of sovereignty since the 1600s. The project will analyze legal concepts of sovereignty that were developed before that time. Cases will be six networked cities of commerce (Bruges, Southampton, Rouen, Lübeck, Toulouse and Florence) in the period of 1400-1620. These cities were interconnected through trade routes, correspondence and diplomacy. Legal concepts depicting the cities’ sovereignty were crafted bottom-up and were often more encompassing than the legal concept of sovereignty of today, also for economic relations. These concepts absorbed changes taking place within cities and in the economic relations between cities. In the CaPANES-project, agent-based and network methods will be used to track down these changes. Developments at the level of individual cities, which will be analyzed with agent-based models, influenced institutional set-ups, constitutional approaches, the organization of trade and policies of access toward foreigners. At the level of networks between cities, dynamics impacting on sovereignty concepts related to foreign relations and these added legal features that were different from those characteristics that resulted from developments within cities. Network analysis will make it possible to detect the dispersal and weight of sovereignty concepts and whether some concepts underpinned a transnational field of sovereignty. Causal patterns underlying change in the concepts mentioned will be the outcome of the research, and following a comparison of historical with present-day situations, these patterns will be used to propose an updated legal concept of economic sovereignty. The project’s team consists of the principal investigator (Dave De ruysscher), one post-doc and five PhD fellows.

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