Surrounded by millennia of civilisation, the Mediterranean is undoubtedly the cradle of navigation. As a result, its technological development played a major role in the rise of European shipbuilding which, at the dawn of the modern era, was to be a driving force in the construction of Europe. But it remains largely unknown until today.
Archaeological research has revealed the coexistence of two different technical cultures at that time: the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But if, over the last three decades, they have made it possible to sketch out a model of Atlantic shipbuilding, on the Mediterranean side, on the other hand, everything remains to be discovered. However, knowing that the latter is the source of many innovations and technological transfers to the Atlantic, its knowledge is essential to our understanding of the European naval organisation and its role in the development and expansion of European nations.
The ModernShip project, ‘The structures of Early Modern Mediterranean Shipbuilding’, aims to highlight this nautical space and its technical culture and to show how it contributed to make the ship an essential tool for Europe construction as a key instrument for trade, war, and discovery and world conquest.
From a methodological point of view, the project seeks to approach the description of Mediterranean naval architecture by characterising it in relation to its Atlantic counterpart. It thus intends to highlight a system of shipbuilding in which these two nautical spaces have been in continuous interaction since the Middle Ages, and attempts to understand them in all the complexity of their exchanges and technological transfers.
