Corporate finance through equities marks the modern period, affecting entire sectors of the economy. The first joint stock companies were inspired at the beginning of the seventeenth century in France models from England and the United Provinces. The ACTIMOD project is a social history project which, with a database of identified shareholders participating in the different companies, should allow to see the social and cultural characteristics of shareholding in France and its evolution, and to highlight a active investor group that weighs on the economic and political choices of the state and announces the influence groups of the contemporary era. They are one of the keys to understanding the economic changes that occur at the end of the modern period.

The VISMIN Project proposes to examine the matter of visibility or invisibility of minorities on the public scene at the end of the Middle Ages, through the evolution of the Jewish minority’s place in a few symbolic towns of the Crown of Aragon. During the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, the powers in the Western territories constantly hesitate between two contradictory attitudes : on the one hand they erase the differences between majority and minorities in an integrative logic corresponding to the Societas Christiana ideal ; on the other hand they distinguish the minorities from the majority to prevent the growing danger they seem to represent in their eyes. Thus the project will focus on the stakes and the tensions between visibility and invisibility in the urban area. Conceived as truly multidisciplinary, the Vismin project will take from paleography, cartography, archeology, anthropology and will use the means of geomatics. The archivistic investigation will lead to the constitution of an open access database which will be performed on PostGreSQL software (in which an extension for the PostGis data will be integrated). The spatial dimension of the tension between visibility and invisibility of the minorities will be grasped in a dynamic manner through the Geographic Information System technology, using ArcGis software, to produce maps and layers. The VISMIN project is a PRC whose main partner is the University of Littoral Côte d’Opale at which Claire Soussen, the scientific coordinator of the project, is full Professor. Historian in Medieval History, her researches are dedicated to the relations between Jews and Christians in the Iberian Peninsula. The other partners of the project are : the University of Perpignan-Via Domitia with Professor Claude Denjean, a specialist of the History of the Jews in the Crown of Aragon and her Phd students who work on the documentation that will be analysed through the VISMIN project ; the EHESS with Jean Passini, member of the CRH, « Directeur d’étude » emeritus, who has produced innovative works about Toledo’s Jewish Quarter, Éric Mermet project engineer at the CNRS (member of Cams) and head of a digital platform at the EHESS, Philippe Blanchard, archaeologist at INRAP and Phd student in history at the EHESS, specialist in funerary archaeology of the Middle Ages, Maurice Kriegel member of the CRH, « Directeur d’études » emeritus, specialist of the History of the Jews in the Middle Ages ; and the Casa de Velázquez that will support the French and Spanish researchers involved in the project : Ingrid Houssaye, researcher at the CNRS and a specialist of the history of trade in the Mediterranean, who works on the Jews of Mallorca, Javier Castaño, researcher at the CSIC and specialist of the History and archaeology of the Jews in Medieval Iberia, Miguel Ángel Espinosa Villegas Professor at the University of Granada with a few members of his team. The project also foresees to hire several people to strengthen the skills of the team : a Phd student in history for 1 year and a half (whose task will be to investigate the archivistic documentation –royal and notarial- in Valencia, Zaragoza and Girona) under the direction of Claire Soussen at Ulco for 1 year, and under the direction of Claude Denjean at UPVD for 6 months ; a project engineer in geomatics for 1 year and a half at EHESS, a post-doc in archaeology (to do researches in surface archeology) for 6 months at Casa de Velázquez. The ANR funding will also finance the missions of staff in the archives in Spain, the purchase of computers for the people hired in the project, the semestrial consortium meetings, the organisation of a final conference at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, the publication of a monography dedicated to the spatial governement of the minorities and a traveling exhibition presenting the maps and layers produced through the geomatical process and pictures of the Jewish Quarters.