The Prize is organized by the Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” Prato, based on an idea by Paolo Evangelisti and Angela Orlandi. It aims to enhance the research of scholars who focus their investigations on the issue of economic solvency considered in all its implications, including those of the languages, as well as the theological, philosophical, and legal lexicons that have structured key concepts and phenomena such as poverty, the common good, public debt, taxation, and monetary institutions. The idea is to foster a long-term approach, avoiding chronological partitions that risk fragmenting the depth and knowability of historical phenomena resulting from complex dynamics matured between the medieval age and the threshold of contemporaneity (11th–18th centuries). The Prize logo, also through the explicit citation of the Lullian ars combinatoria, reflects, synthesizes, and conveys the project and its underlying cultural premises. In particular, it points in the plural to the interaction between economies, poverty, and theologies. The term “economies” refers to diversified structures, factual forms, and patterns of thinking over the longue durée. The concept of “poverty” in the plural is intended to emphasize not only the historically covered semantic range, but also the fact that, in the period indicated, poverty has scales and units of measurement that define different and variously compounded, measurable, and denounceable equalities and inequalities. As for “theologies” (theologies tout court and economic theologies), the plural refers directly to the three main monotheisms at work in medieval Europe and their different legacies developed and settled in the centuries following the crucial 15th and 16th centuries. All this allows for an opening of the prize to the neighboring and bordering worlds of Western Europe. The awarding of the biennial prize stands as a recognition of the commitment of the scholar who has completed that work of excavation and historical framing by proposing innovative methodological and epistemological approaches grounded on solid sources and data. The financial structure supporting the initiative has set itself a minimum objective of a ten-year lifespan, based on already established private sponsorships and economic enterprises that share the aims of the prize in their very own entrepreneurial actions: to contribute to strengthening cultural, social, and economic awareness around the issue of the use of economic resources, and particularly financial resources, within a framework of compatibility that looks at the ecology of the system, therefore at the humanity of the subjects and the living environment, both involved in the circuit that feeds private credit, taxation, and public debt. Within this framework is also the invitation to explore the role played by means of exchange/money in their institutional significance and in their most diverse meanings (see logo). It is precisely research and historical criticism on these topics that can open up more robust horizons of understanding, showing fruitful interconnections and interweavings. It is enough to think, by way of mere example, of the decisive role for reflection on human economic action, market dynamics, and credit played by the interweaving of two historical phenomena characterizing the last three centuries of the medieval age. We are referring here to the rediscovery/reinterpretation of Aristotelian thought and the great season of development of the Mendicant Orders that gave rise to a true Franciscan School of economics. A piece of the history of economic thought and analysis that nurtured not only the Second Scholasticism but also the burgeoning of economic thought in 15th-century Italian humanism and the first affirmation of public banks, as also demonstrated by the historiographical fine-tuning proposed by the latest Treccani supplement to economic thought. In their reverberations of the modern age, these well-structured and established economic lexicons, productive of institutions and concrete experiments, the result of an intense dialectic with the other monotheistic cultures in Europe of the time, starting with the Jewish one, connect with the texts of Konrad Summenharth (1455–1511) or Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), with the thought of the Scottish moralists, with the first great season of French and English political economy, but also with the civil economy (economia civile) proposed by Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769). This is a wide-ranging perspective that, in terms of legal history and legal languages, has also been intensively explored by Italian scholars of the caliber of Giovanni Tarello (1934–1987) or Paolo Grossi (1933–2022). It is within this framework that the great, even older body of textual material, that of Greek and Latin patristics, of monastic norms, reveals itself in all its depth and richness, providing lexicons, taxonomies, and therefore interpretative and managerial frameworks that await further exploration.