Comparer des méthodes

	Serial History	Prosopography
Domaine	Historiography	Social History
Famille	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Année d'origine	1971	1971
Auteur d'origine	Francois Furet; Pierre Chaunu; Ernest Labrousse	Lawrence Stone; Lewis Namier; Charles Beard
Type	quantitative descriptive method	qualitative-quantitative collective method
Source fondatrice	Furet, F. (1971). Le quantitatif en histoire. In J. Le Goff & P. Nora (Eds.), Faire de l'histoire (Vol. 1, pp. 42-61). Gallimard. ISBN: 9782070287666	Stone, L. (1971). Prosopography. Daedalus, 100(1), 46-79.
Alias	Histoire Serielle, Serial History, Quantitative Serial Analysis, History of Series	Collective Biography, Prosopography, Group Biography, Multiple Career Analysis
Apparentées	4	4
Résumé	Serial history, histoire serielle, is the historical method that takes as its object not the unique event but the series: a long, homogeneous sequence of comparable facts, such as grain prices, baptisms, burials, marriages, notarial acts, or wages, recorded at regular intervals. Theorized above all by Francois Furet and practiced by Pierre Chaunu, Ernest Labrousse, and others in the orbit of the Annales school, it grew from Fernand Braudel's call to attend to the slow rhythms of history and from the conviction that the proper data of history are repeated, measurable facts rather than singular happenings. By constructing such series and analyzing their movements, trends, cycles, and fluctuations, the serial historian reconstructs the economic and demographic structures and conjunctures within which events occur. The decisive methodological requirement is homogeneity: the units must be defined and measured consistently across the whole span, so that change in the numbers reflects change in reality rather than in the recording.	Prosopography, or collective biography, is the investigation of the common characteristics of a defined group of historical individuals by means of a uniform set of questions, asked of every member, about their birth, family, education, wealth, careers, office-holding, and connections. Lawrence Stone, whose 1971 essay Prosopography is the field's classic methodological statement, defined it precisely as the study of a population through a collective study of their lives. Rather than writing the biography of one notable figure, the prosopographer treats many lesser-known lives as a dataset, seeking the patterns, the typical paths into an elite, the marriage strategies of a class, the recruitment of an administration, that no single biography could reveal. The method has two great traditions: the study of small, well-documented elites, exemplified by Lewis Namier's analysis of eighteenth-century members of Parliament, and the study of larger, more anonymous populations to map social structure and mobility. It transforms scattered biographical fragments into systematic knowledge of social composition and power.