Project description
Mercantile networks and cultural exchange in Late Medieval Southern Europe
Late Medieval southern Europe witnessed extensive mercantile networks that connected cities and regions through a continuous exchange of goods and people, as well as written communication. It is known that merchants and their families played a key role in circulating texts, images and ideas, making commercial spaces important sites of cultural production and exchange. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TOSCA project aims to explore the importance of these activities using the Datini Archive in Tuscany as a key case study. By combining archival research with digital methods, it will show how merchants and their families, including women, contributed to the spread of literacy, humanist ideas and illustrated manuscripts across commercial routes.
Objective
The TOSCA (The bOok aS CompAss) project investigates the interplay between vernacular writing, mercantile networks and visual culture in late medieval southern Europe. It reinterprets manuscripts, registers, correspondence and inventories as dynamic artefacts that channelled knowledge and exchange across commercial routes.
Focusing on the Datini Archive in Prato (Tuscany, Italy), TOSCA sheds light on the cultural contributions of Tuscan and Italo-Catalan merchants and their families, including women, who ventured beyond traditional urban centres, revealing alternative landscapes of literary and artistic production. Three case studies examine women’s patronage and mediation, the dissemination of vernacular literacy and non-rhetorical humanism, and the role of decorated manuscripts as precursors to 'visual and popular humanism', which originated in mercantile environments.
By combining archival research with digital tools such as prosopographical databases, network analysis and semantic modelling, the project generates FAIR datasets and a replicable framework for studying premodern knowledge transmission. Integrating approaches from cultural history and art history, TOSCA expands our understanding of European humanism, contributes to the valorisation of Europe’s cultural heritage, and supports the researcher’s career development as an independent scholar in cultural history and digital humanities.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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08002 Barcelona
Spain
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