In the literary history of the French Middle Ages, the 12th century can be seen as the century of verse, whereas the 13th is the century of prose, bearing witness to the emergence of great historiographical compilations and the first cycles of romances. Before these texts, there are only a few rare traces of prose as a form of writing, making it difficult to ascertain the context and environment in which they were produced. The translations produced in the north-eastern part of the langue d’oïl-speaking domain in the second half of the 12th century stand out as unique within this panorama. The group of texts is coherent on several levels: from the choice of works translated (patristic texts, parenetic works on monastic life, and homiletics, with Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux in a pre-eminent position) to their language and style. These ‘monastic’ translations, which have remained almost completely neglected by scholarship and are still partly unpublished or accessible only in editions from the late 19th century, can be seen as the first “workshop” that enabled a Romance language to raise its prose to an unprecedented stylistic level. They are also singular in that they are preserved in manuscripts copied in the same environments in which the translations were composed, between the end of the 12th and the very beginning of the 13th century. These are texts that were composed, copied and read within a micro-community, or several micro-communities networked by close links, and which help define these communities as such. Their posterity, as well as their role in the development of the language of preaching and prose narration, remains entirely unknown. The PROSIT project aims to address this complex system of text development, circulation, transformation and reception, while highlighting the unparalleled opportunity for study that these translations represent for a Romance language of this period.

The aim of this project is to develop the analysis of medieval musical texts from the perspective of historical anthropology. It is based on a corpus of texts from the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew traditions written between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. This perspective leads to a departure from the classical methods of musicology in order to highlight: (1) the circulation of individuals, texts and ideas about music; (2) the importance of music in the medieval mentality; (3) the usefulness of music as a field of representation exploited in numerous disciplines. This perspective also reveals the status of the “others” and their musical sensibilities in medieval texts; more generally, it allows us to discern notions of otherness, historicity and authority. The project is structured around four axes: (1) the mapping of musical culture outside the institutional knowledge of music; (2) the analysis of texts on music as cultural interfaces; (3) the development of the notion of musical habitus in the Middle Ages; and (4) the multilingual lexicography of musical terms and concepts. The comparative transcultural approach is the mainstay of the project’s methodology. It seeks to revise the historiographical narrative of musicology, traditionally anchored in Europe, in order to engage with the history of global music. This project lays the foundations for the epistemology of medieval music, as a branch of historical musicology.

PATHS focuses on astronomical and astrological Latin texts produced between the 12th and the last quarter of the 15th century, specifically those exhibiting great variability in manuscript witnesses and a strong dependence on the scientific works of the Greek-Arabic tradition. This project aims to analyse the textual practices characterising these works and to produce innovative philological approaches that make use of the latest digital humanities technologies. Besides focusing on the translation of works of the Greek-Arabic tradition into Latin, and on works that can be regarded as commentaries on, or digests or expositions of them, the project will deal with the following Latin production: in the area of astronomy, texts such as basic introductions to Ptolemaic astronomy; textbooks on planetary theory and spherical astronomy; computus texts for time-reckoning; astronomical tables to compute celestial movements and positions; procedural texts explaining sexagesimal arithmetics, the uses and the construction of tables as well as of instruments; calendars and ephemerides. In the area of astrology, this project will cover basic introductions to astrology; astrological judgments or works explaining how to provide them; weather forecasts; collections of astrological aphorisms. Works on astronomy and astrology were very often transmitted together, and mostly by astronomers and astrologers who would customise their copies for their own or others’ benefit. Indeed, astrology was largely considered the most relevant practical application of astronomy and those involved in astrological operations tended to have solid astronomical expertise. Therefore, the manuscript copies transmitting astronomical and astrological works resemble toolboxes in the hands of variously qualified historical actors. The historical actors involved in the transmission of technical texts organised their handwritten copies according to their own needs or those of their context, approaching these texts with far less reverence than a theologian might a biblical text or a university dean the works of Aristotle. In texts like these, the creative process of a work begins with the conception of an author and continues with the transmission from one user to the next. This poses many problems to a successful reconstruction of texts according to the traditional methods of textual criticism. Indeed, the goal of textual criticism is commonly that of restoring the original form of a given text by comparing its extant copies. Through a process of identification of errors, interpolations, and editorial corrections, the text is restored to its presumed original form, namely that which a specific author is most likely to have given it. The astronomical and astrological texts demonstrate the inadequacy of this type of approach. It is clear that in a context like this, the historical actors manipulating a text must not be seen as an obstacle to the restitution of the ‘pure’ work of a certain author, but rather as a goldmine for a deeper understanding of all those textual practices which are revealing of a dynamic and evolving scientific context. These texts, positioned on the margins of philological endeavour for far too long, can only be properly restored through in-depth analysis of historical textual practices, along with an effective collaboration between philologists, area specialists and digital humanities experts. Technologies such as HTR, network and stylometric analysis, and XML TEI (to name only a few) will be used to this aim, but part of the project will be also devoted to the conceptualisation of a pertinent data structure that both embodies the new philological approaches that will be developed in the project and fosters the collective work of philologists and area specialists. With its long and renowned history of linked and interoperable data structures, the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT), is the best place to carry out this project.

The SPIRITUS project will study the circulation and reception of widely copied spiritual texts in the central and late Middle Ages (12th – 15th c.). To do this, the project will treat a corpus of five 12th-century spiritual works known in some 1,970 manuscripts which, paradoxically, were very widely accessible in the Middle Ages, but have been virtually ignored by historians. The study of this little known European patrimony will demonstrate that spiritual literacy implies an individual and collective transformation at every level of society, including among the laity. Our corpus includes important authors such as Anselm of Canterbury (Orationes sive Meditationes), Hugh of St Victor (De arrha animae), and William of St Thierry (Epistola ad fratres de Monte Dei), and two other works transmitted under prestigious attributions: the Meditationes of Pseudo-Bernard and the Soliloquia of Pseudo-Augustine. The project will combine the fields of codicology, philology, and library history with textual sociology, a new approach that will harvest data in a global, qualitative study of the spiritual readership. The inquiry will branch out in three complementary directions: - The general circulation of the corpus at all levels of medieval society and its adoption by different “communities of interpretation”, throwing light on some little known readers of the Latin works, especially among the laity, nuns, and new spiritual movements (Devotio moderna, the Celestine order). - The influence of the corpus on the composition of new spiritual works, especially within the Devotio moderna, which prolonged the impact of these texts in the 15th century and engendered works never before studied from this perspective, such as the Imitatio Christi. - The role of the corpus in the propagation of devotional exercises, including spiritual reading, meditation, and contemplation, showing how the “technologies of self” (Michel Foucault) favored a more direct relation between the reader and God, both within institutions and on their periphery. To do this, links will be established between manuscripts, a milieu of reception, and the major evolutions in medieval society such as access to manuscripts and religious texts; the practice of spiritual exercises of reading, meditation, and contemplation; relations between the faithful and the religious institution. Thus, the study of reception, literary imitation, and spiritual exercise ought to renew our understanding of reading in medieval society, from the monastic milieu to the aristocracy and the increasingly literate simple folk. Two complementary, open-access tools will be used: the database FAMA (recently developed by the CNRS and the École des chartes: http://fama.irht.cnrs.fr), which will trace the spatio-temporal and social circulation of the corpus using a multi-criteria search for texts and manuscripts; and the SPIRITUS website, which will provide interpretative tools for the data in FAMA, including cartography of circulation in the medieval West, digitization of the most remarkable manuscripts, and the TEI-XML edition of unpublished versions of texts in the corpus.

The project is a first step towards an innovative digital environment for the study of the language and culture of medieval Europe. The medieval civilization can only be investigated by means of the study of traces that have survived to our times. The best source of our knowledge is the texts, preserved in huge quantity and variety. Written mainly in Medieval Latin, within a social context that had nothing in common either with ancient or our times, they have not benefited from recent advances in computational linguistics and digital humanities in general. To challenge this situation we will build, firstly, a large and balanced corpus of Medieval Latin texts composed between 500 and 1500 AD all across Europe. Apart from wide geographical and temporal coverage, the corpus will also reflect the variety of genres practised in the Middle Ages, as well as the functional richness of the medieval textual culture. In order to enable automatic processing, the texts will be annotated with Part-of-Speech, lemma, time and place labels. The compilation and annotation of the corpus, albeit extremely important, will be only a first step of the project. Secondly, a corpus search engine will be built with the help of the CQP-Web software. The users will be able to query the texts and benefit from their rich linguistic annotation through a user-friendly interface. Thirdly, the project aims at developing a set of efficient statistical analysis and data visualisation tools that researchers would embed in their own workflows. Written mostly in R, scripts, programs, wrapper functions will allow for advanced study of Medieval Latin vocabulary, but will be applicable to other languages as well. The project will take advantage of the outstanding documentary and digital infrastructure of the IRHT-CNRS, with its library containing circa 120,000 publications, a pool of IT specialists providing their support for every stage of the project’s workflow. The contributors to the project are practising computational linguists, lexicographers, and historians which will work in close collaboration. During the project a young or early-career scholar is expected to be recruited. Both the texts and the tools will be made freely available to the scientific community through the project’s website and public code repositories. This way of dissemination should not only facilitate research, but is also expected to influence the current practices in historical and philological research by promoting automatic, “distant reading” approaches to ancient texts.