The E-NDP project aims at renewing our knowledge on Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral through the creation of a collaborative digital edition of the registers of its Chapter, the community of 51 canons meeting three times a week on set days to take all administrative, financial and practical decisions pertaining to the cathedral, its estate and the society living in its cloister. This corpus of 170 volumes, spanning the years 1326-1790, and kept today in the French National Archives, has never been the object of a comprehensive study to understand the workings and history of this urban enclave and community which, up to the Revolution, benefitted from a total jurisdictional and fiscal exemption from both King’s and town’s administrations. The collaborative digital edition of the registers, along with the development of two other digital tools — the setting of the parcel plan of the cloister and virtual reconstruction of the Chapter’s library books, of which 350 volumes survive in Parisian libraries (the National Library, Department of Manuscripts and the Arsenal, Bibliothèque Mazarine) —, aims at highlighting the value of a unique part of our world heritage, by bringing together specialists of all disciplinary fields, from the history of the text, of the book, of architecture and building. The collaborative digital edition is based on a process of handwriting text recognition (HTR), tested and supervised by scholars, researchers and engineers combining expertise in Medieval history, paleography, philology and digital humanities. The edition shall allow a better insight into the Chapter’s administration, into its economical and political power within Paris, and the relationships it maintained with other institutions in the city. More generally, it aims at unearthing a major source for the history of men, women, and children who, through their activities, brought a cathedral and a community alive, a place which was not only a centre of political and economical power, but a model for its architecture, the liturgy, the arts and scientific life, not forgetting hospital assistance with the Hôtel-Dieu, the main hospital of the kingdom, which was under the authority of the Chapter. The digital setting of the parcel plan, supported by the Geographic Information System ALPAGE, shall deepen our knowledge of the Medieval district around the cathedral (i.e. all the eastern part of the Île de la Cité) in its material and spatial dimensions, from the 14th century up to the Revolution. The virtual reconstruction of the Chapter’s library books, of which Alfred Franklin has written in 1863 that it constituted ‘the first public library established in France’, shall allow a better understanding of the intellectual authority embodied by the canons of Notre-Dame, whose Chancellor was also the Chancellor of the University of Paris. Lastly, the project will aim at valorisation of the results on three different levels in order to further it beyond its aimed financing: research, teaching, and reaching a non-academic public. On the level of research, the project puts into perspective its object and methods through an epistemological investigation and reflection which places Notre-Dame as an ‘integrative object’ (objet intégratif), according to the terms of the most recent multidisciplary theoretics. As for valorisation through teaching, deliverables of the different objectives are destined to contribute to the teaching of research processes through scholarships and seminars held by the different institutional partners of the projet. To reach non-academic publics, it aims at giving digital access to documentary sources of the renewed history of an emblematic monument, but also to information and participative tools providing insight into the means which enable the critical contruction of knowledge.

The ECOMED project (Economies of the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages, 1350-1500) brings together some 41 researchers from Spain, France, Italy and Greece, all of whom are specialized in the study of the Mediterranean worlds and are particularly interested in questions related to interculturality and the interconnection between different societies. It starts from the observation that there is a divergence between historiographies concerning Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, the former being based on a body of research on climate, the effects of the plague and the economic situation, which is still largely lacking for the Mediterranean area. The project considers the Mediterranean area as a unique space where the questions are posed in the same way. The heterogeneity of the documentary regime of the Byzantine, Muslim and Christian worlds has given rise to very different historiographies, although the problems encountered are similar: the presence and recurrence of the plague, the multiplication of famines and famines in a climate that had become unstable and tended to be wetter and colder at the beginning of the "Little Ice Age", the political instability manifested by incessant and devastating wars and state recompositions constitute facts that are common to the entire basin. The relevance of a divergence in the 15th century between the South and the North must be examined, as must the differences between East and West, while all the evidence also points to practices favouring interculturality between the Muslim and Christian worlds. The ECOMED project will study the environmental challenges encountered on both sides of the sea; agricultural and artisanal production; the use and circulation of raw materials and merchandises; the institutions and conflicts structuring the period and the area; and social mobility and growth.

The purpose of this project is to create and analyze the corpus of monasteries and collegiate churches established in France between the years 816 and 1563. Its objective is to understand the outcomes of the implantation and evolution of this network of establishments, which constitute the primary links connecting cathedrals to parish churches in the clerical landscape. Starting with two databases currently being developed to contain their institutional and physical descriptions to which reconstituted diocesan boundaries are to be integrated, the resulting data silo combined with a Geographical Information System can be harvested by researchers to produce maps for spatial and chronological analyses of these networks. This data silo, a geographical data server, a Web Mapping application and publications resulting from work sessions among the various members of the project will be offered to a wide public (researchers specialized in Humanities and Social Sciences and the general public) via a web portal provided by Huma-Num, a TGIR.

POLIMA is an interdisciplinary project (literature, history, linguistics, anthropology and cognitive sciences) devoted to the study and characterization of the power of lists in the Middle Ages. By analyzing the production, uses, and transmission of lists in the Middle Ages, it aims, on the one hand, to contribute to the study of the medieval culture of writing and, on the other hand, to treat comparatively the relationship established in the list between linguistic utterances, written procedures for marking texts, and systems for knowing the world and controlling possessions and people. The list is a form of writing common to a great many medieval textual productions, one whose presence within texts increases very sharply with the pragmatic turn of Western societies in the thirteenth century. Frequently used by those who wrote, the list was, in some cases, a type of text in itself and was employed in a great variety of contexts. These listing texts ranged from the arrangement of information concerning an action, a subject, or a domain of knowledge (for example, concordances, lists of authors, lists of witnesses, indexes, anthologies…), to the enumeration of the physical properties and parts of objects having material substance (for example, inventories, catalogs, praises of a city…), to the production of taxonomies (for example, territorial or fiscal lists). Due to the great variation in ways of connecting elements assembled within the same text, a syntactic definition of the list was chosen as a frame for this project. Any text constructed in paratactic form can be included in the corpus, which leads to the inclusion of what current usage designates, for instance, as enumerations, lists, catalogs, inventories, or counts. Project POLIMA has several complementary scientific aspects. The compilation and placing online of a bibliography and a corpus of listing texts will constitute the basis for collective analysis. In seven consecutive workshops, these texts will be studied. An initial topical focus will encourage interdisciplinary work and is particularly intended to test the boundaries of the poetic, didactic, and pragmatic; the focus will then turn to the combinations, taxonomies and aggregates produced by listing processes. From the results obtained, a collaborative synthesis on “Powers of the List in the Middle Ages” will be written. This volume will try to clarify the connection which links forms of thinking to writing practices in the Middle Ages, at a time of basic change in the culture of writing and a new historical stage in the system of communication. By describing the concrete forms that textual “disalignment” offered for organizing information and producing knowledge and by studying how these listing forms influenced the evolution of ways of knowing and of controlling property and people, the project will enable comparison between two historical turning points in Western systems of communication, the central Middle Ages and the twenty-first century. For this purpose, three main research focuses will be privileged : 1) long-term study of forms for classifying and indexing knowledge and heritage (such as tables, concordances, indexes, and inventories); 2) evaluation of the impact of the development and dissemination of listing forms on the processes by which texts, objects, knowledge and know-how are formatted and passed on in material form; 3) re-evaluation of the historical role of algorithmic thinking in the emergence of forms of Western rationality.

TRANSPERSE The Acts of the Persian Martyrs between East and West. Intercultural transmission and images at the beginning of the 5th century. Using multidisciplinary approaches, this project seeks to reconstruct a history of the intercultural exchanges between Persia and the regions bordering it – the Caucasus, the Byzantine world – and as far as Egypt and the Latin West during the circumscribed period of the reigns of the Sasanians Yazdgird I and Wahram V (from 399 to 438) by comparing rich literary sources that are mostly unpublished, untapped, difficult to access, or poorly identified and by developing a supporting open-access digital tool aimed at a wide audience. The Acts of the Persian Martyrs offer an exceptional record of the period. This literary material, originally written in Syriac by the Christian communities of the empire, constitutes a homogenous and absolutely unique set of texts, a cycle spanning both reigns. The project’s first aim is to bring together, edit and analyse the Acts from this period, treating them as a whole for the first time. The second aim, related to the first, is to study the Acts through the prism of intercultural transmission between East and West. This interdisciplinary research will contribute to a better understanding of the essential role played by texts from the Christian communities of Persia in constructing identities, both in Christian societies in the East and in Western regions. Written in Iran, these texts were disseminated very early in exogenous cultural areas: Coptic, Byzantine, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Arabian and Latin. Several aspects remain unknown including the ways in which these martyrological texts were disseminated, the intercultural exchanges among communities in this geographical space, and the fundamental question of the role of lettered Eastern Christian communities in such intertextual movements, particularly in the West. Comparative approaches are a major asset for understanding this transmission across different areas. The third aim is to bring to light contrasted images of the reigns by comparing contemporaneous and later documentation from other corpora, especially in Arabic and Persian. All these sources in diverse languages (Syriac, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Persian, Arabic and Latin), from various areas and from different time periods, will be gathered to create synergies through original publications, an international conference and the development of a “sourc-e-book”: an open-access database bringing together all documents and previously unpublished sources about the first forty years of the fifth century in Persia. The project seeks to make a significant contribution to a little-explored and highly compartmentalised field of research by making available a freely accessible, innovative research tool to the national and international academic community. The interdisciplinary team formed to conduct this research will endeavour to fill a real knowledge gap and to lift two major scientific barriers, namely the inaccessibility of many documents from Christian communities in the East, often due to their unpublished nature; and insufficient treatment and historical analysis in determining processes of transfer into different languages, among other aspects. Another expected outcome is to strengthen the research network in order to spark new national and international research initiatives on other Sasanian periods or other corpora of sources in the future. Disseminating the knowledge obtained will also contribute to raising public awareness of the history of Christians in the Middle East and their ancient pre-Islamic roots in these regions. The inter-community conflicts of yesteryear will thus help to understand the shaping of identities today.