Comment travaillent les fonctionnaires et aux confins du monde impérial chinois ? Comme ailleurs, ils produisent des écritures grises afin d’informer le pouvoir central et leurs successeurs de leur gestion administrative et de la situation sociale de la zone dont ils ont la charge. Cette paperasse n’était logiquement pas destinée à être conservée. Cependant, la découverte fortuite de milliers de manuscrits emmurés à Dunhuang présente à l’historien et à l’historienne une dizaine d’écrits géographiques locaux susceptibles de combler les blancs d’une production scripturaire importante mais méconnue. L’analyse proposée dans cet article suit une trajectoire double. Elle s’attelle d’une part à montrer la codification de genres géographiques comme les guides et les traités illustrés, dont peu d’éléments matériels sont connus. D’autre part, elle dévoile les indices qui attestent une richesse typologique indéniable, à travers la présence de topographies et de récits narratifs. L’étude de ces manuscrits souligne combien la circulation du savoir géographique était tant verticale qu’horizontale, et bien plus complexe que l’image héritée de l’historiographie impériale. Ce travail permet de réévaluer les débuts du tournant local dans la production des savoirs bureaucratiques, de caractériser l’affirmation du rôle des acteurs locaux en dépit d’un anonymat de façade et de mettre en évidence la manière dont se construit une localité dans la Chine médiévale.

Au contraire d’autres mouvements équivalents, lemouvement scientifique né dans l’Europe du xviie siècle s’inscrivit dans la durée au lieu de s'essouffler au bout de quelques générations. Afin de comprendre cette persistance, cet article s’appuie sur le cas de la France au temps de Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). Il soutient que les hommes de lettres ont joué un rôle crucial dans la légitimation du mouvement scientifique naissant. Ces hommes de lettres, qui jouissaient d’une affinité sociale, intellectuelle et esthétique avec la « nouvelle science », tissèrent le récit du progrès scientifique en mettant en avant l’idée d’une rupture radicale avec le passé. Défenseurs des idées modernes ou des modèles classiques, ils diffusèrent ce récit au sein de l'élite culturelle, mobilisant penseurs, découvertes et instruments scientifiques de leur époque à travers des débats variés. Ce faisant, ils forgèrent le récit d'une « révolution scientifique », qui exerça une profonde influence sur l’histoire sociale et culturelle de la science moderne.

Loin de se limiter à fournir des informations relatives aux communautés juives de l’Égypte médiévale, les documents dits de la Genizah du Caire contiennent de très nombreuses pièces d’archives de l’administration du califat fatimide (910-1171) lors de sa phase égyptienne (973-1171). Considéré comme l’un des califats les plus puissants de son temps, le fonctionnement de son administration n’était jusqu’à présent connu qu’à travers quelques manuels de chancellerie rédigés au xiie siècle et édités. Ces textes, composés par des administrateurs fatimides, offrent soit des données techniques et très spécifiques qu’il est difficile de généraliser soit une tentative de réforme d’une administration considérée entre les lignes comme sinon défaillante en tout cas amendable. Marina Rustow se propose de comparer les différentes pièces d’archives fatimides retrouvées dans le corpus de la Genizah du Caire avec certains manuels de chancellerie afin d’éclairer les procédures administratives fatimides. Son objectif est de mettre en évidence le caractère moderne et même wébérien, selon ses termes, de l’administration fatimide afin de rompre avec ce qu’elle considère comme une idée reçue, à savoir que les administrations califales médiévales, aux mains de despotes orientaux, n’auraient pas été capables de créer des archives et des procédures standardisées d’administration et d’archivage. Cette approche, en tout point novatrice, permet à l’autrice des conclusions très intéressantes et audacieuses qui doivent toutefois être nuancées.

By starting from a series of practical manuscript manualsproduced by Spanish inquisitors for daily use in their work, then followingtheir references to Latin legal treatises, it is possible to gain a betterunderstanding of the theoretical, theological, philosophical, and pastoralunderpinnings of inquisitorial practice. Further information can be gleaned bycomparing the procedural structure of trials with the relaciones de causas, the reports that summarizedthose trials and justified inquisitors’ decisions to their superiors. Thisdouble approach reveals that the inquisitorial trial of faith can beconceptualized on two different levels: the formal judicial proceedings thatshaped the organizational sequence of the trial, and another process thatfollowed a less explicit internal logic and sought to produce a penitentialrather than a judicial truth. Though less evident for modern readers of theInquisition’s archives, this second level formed a key part of the theoreticalapparatus described in the Latin treatises. The first level was repressive and,once the offense was proved in conformity with all judicial forms, imposedpunishment. The second was integrative and ecclesiastic, and aimed toreintegrate defendants into the fold of the Catholic Church even when foundguilty. The inquisitors mobilized these two levels with a certain flexibilitythat has not always been evident to historians: seen from this angle, theirexpressions of interest in defendants’ spiritual well-being were more thansimple hypocrisy. The two conflictual logics nevertheless meant that theinquisitorial trial of faith was an unbalanced edifice that could easily sway inone direction or the other, depending on the inquisitors’ choices. Over time, itappears that the penitential aspect of the trial took precedence over the purelyjudicial dimension. There are several indications that a similar double logicgoverned the criminal trials of other jurisdictions, meaning that such anapproach may shed a broader light on early modern institutions and theirresolution of conflicts.

This article examines the martyrdom of the Jesuitmissionary Saint João de Brito (1647-1693) and the beginnings of his cult, atonce embedded in the local dynamics of the Tamil country and extending towardsbroad imperial horizons. How did a Portuguese Jesuit, an agent of modern globalCatholicism, become such a locally anchored figure? And how did the last momentsof Brito’s life initiate a Tamil devotion that has lasted for over threecenturies? A diverse array of sources is used to address these questions: themultilingual archives produced during early inquiries in support of Brito’scanonization (particularly the witness statements of his catechists), amissionary treatise in Tamil, and a life of Brito composed in Tamil by one ofhis catechists and preserved in a palm-leaf manuscript. Two conclusions emergefrom this study. In the early eighteenth century, witnessing a martyrdom couldbe a means of acquiring a certain degree of sanctity, and thus a spiritual andsocial authority transmissible within family lineages. Moreover, by witnessingBrito’s life and death, Tamil Christian laymen found a way of inscribing theirown lives into the history of Catholicism on both local and global scales.

This article compares the cartographical representationsof the Caspian region produced around 1560 in Goa and Venice, with references toother centers of mapmaking such as Lisbon, Seville, and Antwerp. It explores thescientific, cultural, technical, and commercial logics that led to profoundlydissimilar cartographies of the Caspian and its surroundings in differentcenters of map production around the same time. It asks questions about thecontrasts between maritime and terrestrial cartography in the Renaissance, andthe cartographical languages associated with each of these cartographical modes.The habitus of maritime cartographers in Goa, Lisbon, and Seville differedprofoundly, it is argued, from that of mapmakers in Italy, and particularlyVenice, who aimed for an integration of all available data as part of atradition of commenting on Ptolemy, and produced highly desirable printed mapsfor a growing consumer audience. The article thus advocates a comparativeapproach to maps, and critiques the assumption that knowledge “flows” betweenregions. It proposes instead a “(dis)connected history” of knowledge productionand consumption to throw new light on the origins of the cartographical printingrevolution.

This essay analyzes a recently discovered French play, Les esclaves livournais à Alger, authored by François Gariel in Livorno in 1786. The protagonist of the piece, which is full of allusions to contemporary Tuscan and European events and subtle references to classics of French Enlightenment literature, is a virtuous, Algiers-based Jewish merchant who preaches toleration for all peoples and religions and greatly admires the grand duke of Tuscany. Important context for understanding Gariel’s play and the Jewish question in Livorno is provided by the relocation in the 1780s of prominent Algerian Jewish families who had built their fortunes on the ransom of captives, as well as the active but contested Jewish participation in the Livornese theatrical scene. Once the play’s many allusions are decoded and its layers are peeled back, Les esclaves takes us to the heart of Tuscan political debates about Jewish participation in the public sphere and illuminates widespread anxieties about Jewish power, intertwined with ambivalence about the prominent role of Jews in the commerce and ransom of captives. Livorno’s historical ties with the Maghreb are thus central to assessing the public discourse about the Jewish condition in Tuscany. A Mediterranean perspective in turn complicates our understanding of minority-majority relations as Enlightenment debates on toleration and Jewish integration flourished in Western Europe.

This paper applies to ancient Greece an approachdeveloped by Pierre Rosanvallon: the integration of philosophicaltexts with the most everyday documents to better grasp a society’sunderstanding of its political life. For the ancient polis, this meansfocusing on the more prosaic evidence offered by cities’ inscriptions,especially their collective decisions published on stone. It is usedhere to consider the changing ideas about the nature of political andprivate life—and especially the space between them. In a veryinfluential model, Classical Athenian democrats and philosopherstended to insist on a sharp binary distinction between public/political life and private life, leaving little room for a notion ofan intermediate third space of polis life, similar to a “socialsphere” or “civil society.” This pattern remained dominant in theHellenistic and Roman periods, but, especially after c. 150 BC, someGreek citizens and intellectuals developed, above all in inscriptions,a much more explicit, complex, and subtle notion of “social life” assomething between politics and private life. The article concludes byasking what the different ancient concepts discussed can contribute tocurrent historiographical debates about the nature of the Greek cityafter c. 150 BC, especially when it comes to moving beyond thetraditional picture of “depoliticization.” It also calls into questionthe orthodox narrative of the development of ideas of “the social”over many centuries up to the present.

This article presents a comparative analysis ofthe commons in two broad regions of medieval southern Europe: northernItaly and the Iberian Peninsula’s Duero Plateau. Recent scholarship ondifferent regions of northern Europe has highlighted the centrality ofcommon lands to both agrosystems and the organization of communities,drawing on the economic theories of Elinor Ostrom and generallyfocusing on the early modern period. It has also suggested a contrastbetween resilient communities in northern Europe, where the presenceof stable commons helped absorb social inequality, and those ofsouthern Europe, where less solid commons supposedly resulted in lowercohesion among communities. Our longue-durée comparative study of these tworegions shows, however, that commons existed in southern Europe fromthe early medieval period on. It also reveals how they evolved andadapted throughout the High and late Middle Ages, in tandem with thedocumentary practices that recorded them. This resilience tookdifferent forms in each of the areas studied, reflecting the influenceof a range of different factors across southern Europe. The commonsendured because they were part of a “moral economy” of collective use,which, in constant dialogue with notions of property and ownership,helped forge lasting identities in both rural and urban contexts andon different scales.

Fondé sur l’analyse d’une trentaine d’expériences de pêche réalisées sur les côtes de la Manche entre les années 1680 et 1860, cet article décrit les premières manifestations d’un mode de gouvernement expérimental des ressources de la mer sous l’Ancien Régime, puis sa normalisation progressive au cours du xixe siècle. Il montre comment les mesures de police des pêches destinées à assurer la conservation de ces ressources sont le résultat d’une négociation entre l’administration centrale de la marine et les communautés de pêcheurs, dont le monopole sur la production du savoir halieutique leur permet de défendre leur particularisme technique et juridique.