PredicMo considers preaching as a common element of the three Abrahamic religions. Preaching has, however, been understudied in a connected perspective. This project aims to establish a common "grammar" of preaching, understood as a set of principles, rules, strategies and models, together with their variations. While Judaism refutes its universal vocation, Islam and Christianity have placed preaching at the heart of their doctrine. As the driving force of 'making people believe', preaching is understood as a device (dispositif Foucault) embodied by the presence of an individual or a group in a territory in order to constitute or consolidate a community of believers. Adopting a Weberian perspective, the programme focuses on preaching, whose objective is to convince and which develops in a context of religious crisis, and not only on the cure of souls. Preaching as an internal and external constitutive device of faith experiences has been constantly reshaped since the end of the 19th century. PredicMo focuses on its contemporary reinventions and redefinitions. PredicMo will renew the study of preaching through original transversal hypotheses. In order to do so, it has chosen the Middle East as a privileged observatory, a space of elaboration and circulation, constantly connected with international dynamics. The seven territories concerned by our survey (Egypt, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq) have all experienced this large-scale phenomenon with varying temporalities, actors and dynamics. The project first argues that preaching is a common matrix for the three Abrahamic religions. By analysing preaching in the light of its lexicon (S1), its cartography (S2) and its staging (S3), the programme's first objective is to propose a common ‘grammar’ of preaching. Its second objective is to elaborate a solid and innovative reflexive methodology allowing a religious, temporal and geographical decompartmentalization (A1). Not limiting itself by focusing on a specific country, PredicMo will analyse influences, emulations, competition in preaching discourses and spatial strategies using several case studies. Finally, preachers have played a decisive role in the (re)configuration of the religious and political environments of the Middle East since the late 19th century, but no archival corpus is devoted to them. Our third objective is therefore to build a catalogue and a corpus of indexed preaching archives (A2). Supported by IREMAM, Ifpo and EFR, PredicMo will gather an international and interdisciplinary team to cross-analyse new visual, sound and written sources, developing digital tools to make them accessible to a large public. The team consists of specialists of Islam, Judaism and Christianity with a long experience in Middle Eastern fieldwork, as well as various actors of preaching. The people in charge of the three institutions, and the scientific subprojects will guarantee the good governance of the programme (A5). In partnership with the Mucem, a data collection-survey will focus on the material conditions of preaching. Besides its theoretical contributions, publications and scientific promotion (A4), PredicMo will deliver an online dictionary of the vocabulary of preaching (A1), an indexed catalogue of the sources of preaching and a mapping of the trajectories of preachers (A2). The collaboration with the Mucem will make possible the integration of some of the items of the survey-collection into the museum collection and the creation of an itinerant exhibition (A3). Reflecting the team’s approach, two web-documentaries as well as several video and audio clips will be produced and made accessible to a large audience: academics, students, and the general public.

This research project in heritage sciences proposes to process and analyze the unpublished documentation gathered during the last restoration of the Carrara Gallery in the Farnese Palace conducted between 2013 and 2015, whose data will be examined for the first time and complemented by the in-depth study of the critical fortune of the work. For the Baroque period, the Carracci Gallery played a role comparable to that of the Sistine Chapel in the Renaissance, that of a model to which all artists referred: knowledge of the techniques used by the Carracci family in the Farnese Palace is therefore essential for understanding the transformations that took place on this site and that determined a large part of the evolution of painting in Rome and, subsequently, in all of Europe from the 17th century onwards. The project allows for an optimal study thanks to the involvement of those involved in the restoration, the research laboratories that have been associated with it, and the availability of the results of this work through a database. To do this, restorers, Technical Art Historians, scientists, art historians, historians and architects are called upon to work in synergy.

GRACEFUL17 seeks to build a transnational research team between the École Nationale des Chartes; the Goethe University Frankfurt; the École française and the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, and the University of Reims to investigate a transnational theme: the largely overlooked governance system of papal regimes of grace that paradoxically thrived when they should have gone extinct. Scholarship emphasizes that the early modern period belonged to absolutist states and princes, not to the antiquated administrations of the papacy dispensing graces to petitioners between the Atlantic, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific. This entails that our goals encompass more than a merely empirical correction: they also require a hermeneutical shift to get a better understanding of authority and authoritative acts that remained under the historian’s radar. In sharp contrast with mainstream understandings of power, grace was operationalized as an infinite resource that, in Catholic Christendom, governed souls as much as subjects on a spectrum ranging from sacramental absolution to the routine clearing of transactions of church property. Considering the reactive style of governance in early modern European polities, we wish to undertake a Copernican turn in the history of global agencies such as early modern Catholicisms and the papacy. Our findings should not lead us back to top-down accounts of centralization but instead support the bottom up analysis of regimes of grace that flowed from diverse glocal peripheries to a polymorphic center. Global governance was underpinned by local dynamics. In order to navigate uncharted oceans of documents in the Vatican Archives, and to manage the resulting mass of data, our research program seeks, firstly, to intertwine a team research component that furnishes representative statistical data on the broad dimensions of papal regimes of grace in the 17th Century; and a monographic component of case-studies investigating the local dynamics behind the hermetic figures emerging from papal registers. Secondly, it aims to balance this in-depth research axis into one specific type of grace–papal provision “on the ground” to lower church offices at the expense of local recruitment channels–with a transversal axis in the Companion to Grace Component that considers the full range of papal graces and institutions dispensing them in the early modern period. Thirdly, it commits to using the thus accumulated data sets as a pilot for the development of digital data management and research tools in the Digital Humanities Component that extend the life span and the accessibility of our data beyond this project. Focusing, fourthly, on the training of early career researchers for whom this grant proposal has been designed, GRACEFUL17 seeks to put grace as an organizational principle of human collectivities on the research agenda again of the humanities as well as anthropological, social and political sciences.

The GLOBALVAT project seeks to access data of exceptional value to history and the social sciences – namely, the Vatican archives on the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, opened in 2020 – and to harness it as a resource for twentieth-century world history. While the opening of these archives has attracted a great deal of media and public interest, this previously unseen collection also sheds new light on a wide range of subjects and places that go well beyond the Second World War and purely ecclesiastical matters. It is for this reason that the GLOBALVAT project has chosen to study the archives with regard to a central issue: how did the Catholic Church commit to rebuilding a world destroyed by war through its involvement in numerous areas, from the reorganization of international relations to the redefinition of human identity? It is a question that leads on to crucial contemporary issues – the emergence of a pluralized international system due to the developing role of religious organizations; the spread of various currents of secularization in Europe and the United States as well as in colonial and decolonized societies; and the gradual integration of democratic and care values and practices. In order to study these issues and coordinate collaborative research into these huge archives, the project will focus on three areas using a multi-scalar approach – the international system, the regulation of society, and human identity – and will also include the creation of a cross-cutting database. The GLOBALVAT project brings together an experienced and close-knit multidisciplinary team, whose previous work together includes study into the archives of the former pontificate (Pius XI 1922-1939) plus assignments relating to the proposed project, with the organization of a seminar in 2019-2020 followed by various scientific and promotional activities in 2020/21. Backed by a solid university consortium centred around the Ecole française de Rome, GLOBALVAT aims to provide a resource and training platform that will enable the French research community, in collaboration with its network of colleagues abroad, to play a pivotal role in this international field of research. In order to achieve this and to generate a sustainable dynamic, the project will span four years and consist of five work packages (WPs): in addition to general tasks (WP1), the project will focus on research into these complex archives, whose access it will facilitate either directly, via assignments, or indirectly through the creation of a database on the pope’s audiences (WP2); the organization of scientific events (WP3); the training of young researchers (WP4); and the production of deliverables for a range of audiences (WP5).

The ArTerm project inquiries a key moment in French cultural history by proposing to examine the hypothesis of an interdependence between France and Italy in the progressive elaboration of the notion of "heritage". Through a comparative approach and voluntarily by using this term in an anachronistic way, we propose to re-examine this notion by taking into account the processes of cultural transfers and national appropriations that contribute to its making, well before this notion was used at the end of the 18th century, in connection with the foundation of museums. In other words, the notion of heritage should be approached as a shared good, at the crossroads of the history of migrations, of artists, of the diffusion of techniques, of the material circulation of works of art as well as of the taste of elites for art objects. The flowering of texts on the fine arts and, consequently, of a specific theoretical and technical terminology, is the result of intense and long-lasting exchanges between these two socio-cultural areas, which are geographically close but politically distant and sometimes in conflict, too. The diachronic investigation that ArTerm, from 1519 to 1699, intend to carry out, includes a period of two centuries which highlight the progressive shift of the centre of gravity of the arts from Rome to Paris. This period contains the development of a varied typology of artistic-literary texts, which can be subdivided into three categories: art treatises, descriptions of works, biographies and academic speeches. The project therefore aims at studying, through texts, the modalities of transfer from one language to another of the terminology of artistic theory and practice. Indeed, through the phenomena of diffusion, translation, and borrowing of Italian lexicon into French, we propose to follow the political and cultural interest of France for Italian creation, up to the triumph of French art and the "Grand Siècle", which translates a political will of emancipation from foreign influences. With a cycle of bimonthly seminars and ongoing digital training for team members, the four years project will be devoted to gathering texts and iconographic sources relating to this phenomenon, in order to document and analyze in details the described mechanisms thanks to an interoperate database of references, as well as a query interface, consenting the lexicon analysis from a semantic point of view and in translation. The ANR funding will enable this investigation to be systematised by widening the corpus taken into account to 70 writings from other fields (architecture, perspective, statuary, artists' biographies, lessons at the Academy, poetic and prose descriptions of works of art, travelogues). In the continuity of a project specifically devoted to a corpus of paintings (25 texts) in progress within the ArTerm team, this broadening appears to be essential to the investigation on artistic terminology in the modern period. The cross-study of French and Italian texts composing this artistic literature will make it possible to trace both the phenomena of translation of aesthetic theories and artistic models, and the lexicological transfers of sectorial language from one idiom to the other. The theoretical and methodological model of bi-national comparison can certainly be used in an extended investigation to different textual typologies, other periods or geographical areas. The project thus intends to take an innovative view in the fields of literature, languages and civilisations of modern Europe, to decompartmentalise knowledge in the history of art and literature, artistic techniques and collections, to provide theoretical and lexicographical tools for a precise study of the genesis of the notion of heritage, while deepening knowledge in the field of the history of the book, with a to better view on the materiality of the art works and the data available for today's restorers and conservators.