Laurence Fontaine

Laurence FONTAINE is a historian and research director at the CNRS attached to the Maurice Halbwachs Center (CNRS-ENS-EHESS). She was a professor in the Department of History and Civilizations at the IUE-Florence from 1995 to 2003. She has worked on mountain societies and migrations and is currently interested in poverty, popular economies and survival strategies as well as the social and cultural aspects of credit and the market in a dialogue between pre-industrial European societies and the contemporary world.

Her publications include: Histoire du colportage en Europe, Paris, Albin Michel, 1993 (History of pedlars in Europe, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996); L’Economie morale. Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle, Paris, Gallimard, 2008. Awarded by the Prix des rendez-vous de l’histoire de Blois in 2009 (The Moral Economy. Poverty, Credit and Thrust in Early Modern Europe, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2014); Household Strategies for Survival, 1600-2000: Fission, Faction and Cooperation, Laurence Fontaine and Jürgen Schlumbohm (eds), Cambridge University Press, 2000; Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to The Present, L. Fontaine ed., Berghahn, Oxford, 2008; Les paradoxes de l’économie informelle. A qui profite les règles? Laurence Fontaine and Florence Weber (dir.), Paris, Karthala, 2011; Le Marché, Histoire et usages d’une conquête sociale, Paris, Gallimard, 2014.