Confronta i metodi

	Prosopography	Serial History
Campo	Social History	Historiography
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1971	1971
Ideatore	Lawrence Stone; Lewis Namier; Charles Beard	Francois Furet; Pierre Chaunu; Ernest Labrousse
Tipo	qualitative-quantitative collective method	quantitative descriptive method
Fonte seminale	Stone, L. (1971). Prosopography. Daedalus, 100(1), 46-79.	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
Alias	Collective Biography, Prosopography, Group Biography, Multiple Career Analysis	Histoire Serielle, Serial History, Quantitative Serial Analysis, History of Series
Correlati	4	4
Sintesi	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.	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.