Summer 2024

Ars Mercatoria

Project Lead: Helena Miton

Merchant textbooks were exchanged for centuries in Western Europe (especially Low Countries, France and Italy) and included various types of information, including, but not limited to, describing the ideal of the profession and their desired qualities, economic information including which goods could be found in which city (and at which rates), social and institutional information (e.g., what are the institutions and customs of trading in different places), and arithmetic and book-keeping skills. Historical scholarship has only scratched the surface of the rich and diverse information. The Ars Mercatoria Project builds on the catalog of merchants’ manuals of the same name, covering thousands of manuals over the time period 1470-1700. This project aims to sketch a better understanding of the knowledge that was deemed worth circulating -in print- by a professional community.

Project Members

Project Team

Helena Miton

Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Business

Joy Kim

Undergraduate Researcher - Summer, 2024

Exploring Merchant Manuals

Joy Kim

This summer at CESTA, I worked on the Ars Mercatoria Project, where I primarily searched through five main libraries (Madrid BN, Paris BN, Leiden UB, Amsterdam EHB, Kunitachi HitUL), for digitized merchant-related texts listed in the Ars Mercatoria Catalog, including arithmetic textbooks and travel accounts. Out of 825 texts from these libraries, there were 211 total digitized renditions that I could source for the project.

Library	Number of Manuscripts	Number of Digitized Manuscripts
Paris BN	464	44
Leiden UB	47	1
Amsterdam EHB	235	139
Madrid BN	64	14
Kunitachi HitUL	15	13

Initially, there were struggles with sourcing these manuscripts, from a linguistic level. For instance, producing editions with modified or romanized titles was a popular practice. Additionally, some publishers reproduced manuscripts into multiple parts, and so tracking each individual part proved to be a difficult task. However, as I grew accustomed to linguistic conventions and took initiative to learn key phrases, I was able to effectively source the manuscripts.

Figure 1. This is a French manuscript from the Ars Mercatoria Catalog, describing a sociological perspective on the persecution of Christians in Japan, written by the famous merchant and traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.

I then systematically organized these manuscripts by geographic region and recorded detailed metadata, including library of origin, publication date, publisher, and author. Additionally, I created catalogues of author and publisher relationships for each library, in order to highlight the connections between individuals.

Figure 2. This is a breakdown of the number of manuscripts that are housed in each country across the Globe.

A few interesting trends were brought to light: some authors published for themselves; others sought out the same publisher for all of the book’s editions. To better illustrate this, I then created an interactive data visualization of author-publisher relationships from Amsterdam EHB, since it had the most complete meta-data out of all the libraries.

Figure 3. This is a network graph depicting the connections between authors and publishers of manuscripts housed in the Amsterdam EHB library.

Overall, this summer was focused on sourcing the data needed to glean insights on the networks and processes that contributed to the spread of commercial knowledge in Europe.