BiNaH : Bibliothèque Nationale “Hebraica”: Hebrew Manuscripts in Paris A comprehensive cataloguing and an historical recherche of the collection of Hebrew manuscripts held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) still remains a desideratum. The collaborative project Bibliothèque Nationale “Hebraica”: Hebrew Manuscripts in Paris (BiNaH) aims at filling this gap. The project's goal is, on the one hand, to prepare the first complete and updated catalogue of the BNF Hebrew manuscripts and, on the other, to write the history of the collection, through an in-depth research of the different components, legacies and intellectual endeavours behind the acquisition and assembling of BNF’s Hebrew collection. This collection is one of the richest worldwide including almost 1500 Hebrew manuscripts. Assembled through the centuries from various important legacies, these manuscripts date from the middle ages to the modern era and originate from all over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. This remarkable corpus includes manuscripts on different topics: Biblical codices and Torah scrolls, Biblical commentaries, Talmudic and rabbinic texts, theological treatises, prayer books, and historical works. It also includes documents from everyday life, philosophical, scientific, medical, lexicographical, magical and mystical treatises. Some manuscripts are splendidly illuminated, others are kabbalistic parchments that once belonged to humanists and Hebraists. The unique stories and intellectual endeavours behind the acquisition and assembling of the Hebrew collection of the BNF still remain to be explored. Its history is intimately linked not only to Jewish cultural history but to the inner development of French history and European civilization. The duty of preserving and enhancing these invaluable treasures is at the heart of BiNaH project. The project will be hosted at IRHT (IRHT, irht.cnrs.fr/, CNRS UPR 841, Paris) and coordinated by Dr. Emma ABATE (researcher at IRHT) in collaboration with the BNF, in the person of Dr. Laurent HÉRICHER (chief curator of the Department of Oriental manuscripts). The codicological, palaeographical and historical investigation of the manuscripts will be carried out by an international team of scholars in the field of Hebrew codicology and palaeography, iconography, Jewish Studies, and with the technical support of the IRHT Digital humanities pole. The principal aims of the project BiNaH are the following: (1) To publish a complete and fully updated catalogue, in print and online, of the Hebrew manuscripts collection held at the BNF. (2) To create a database, serving the specific purpose of cataloguing Hebrew manuscripts and structuring catalogue records, and an open-access and collaborative web platform enabling users to access the in-depth descriptions of the database and all existing information about each manuscript. The database and the web platform will be completely interoperable with other existing systems, granting exchange with major catalogues, digital images repositories and open-source projects, such as Gallica (gallica.bnf.fr/) and Ktiv (web.nli.org.il/). (3) To publish a collective volume highlighting the history and the treasures of the BNF Hebrew collection. This historical investigation will be conducted on the basis of in-depth research into the available archival and by following the intellectual paths of scribes, owners and collectors who moulded the private collections behind the BNF Hebrew collection. This project will considerably improve our knowledge in the domains of Hebrew manuscripts and of Hebrew book culture and literacy from the middle ages through the early modern period. Its final goal is to enhance the knowledge of an invaluable cultural heritage and to facilitate its preservation.

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.

BeCore aims at a comparative study of the textual and graphical signs of authority and validity in medieval charters, basing on the resources given by Monasterium (), an edition and diffusion portal containing more than 600 000 charters from all Europe, of which some 270 000 are linked to images of the original documents. In addition to adding some new corpora to it, tools for the semi-automated in-dexation and searching in images of handwritten texts, as well as of graphical and ornamental signs, will be implemented in Monasterium, basing on the results of previous projects (projects ORIFLAMMS, ANR-12-CORP-0010, and HIMANIS, European project Heritage plus). This will allow for the serializing and comparative studying of the marks of authority, along several lines of research: the signs of authority, the circulation of models, and the relationships between graphical and textual signs. Going beyond the mere aspect of authentication, seen from the eye of the detective trying to assess a falsification, also implies questioning the exchanges between the realisation of the documents and their reception. The scribe laying down a charter did so in the expectation of its (maybe fictive?) reception by a third part, a third part which had to be convinced of what it would see, this not being limited to a judicial control of formal authenticity. In that regard, a charter was also the potential carrier of the outward expression of validity, as well as a pos-sible mean of (self-)representation. Assessing the various ways and means used will lead to a kind of phenomenology of the expression of power and authority – the fundamental hypothesis being that it may not be possible to establish a firm and strict typology, as the practices did vary too much in their use of the few possible elements, and it may in consequence be better to work on the level of the observation of graphical phenomena and the reconstruction of their possible reception; but strictly typologising these might be more confusing than revealing. The project will give insights into this development by studying datasets over a long time period (12th – 15th century and by creating large scale data sets. The selected data sets will contribute to testing hypotheses on the models of authority in formal documentation in monastic orders (OCist, OSB). Therefore, the major expected outcomes of the project are threefold: 1) Increase the size of actual relevant corpora 2) Enhance the Monasterium.net data structure in relationship to diplomatic and historical classifications 3) Enhance the Monasterium.net metadata structure to allow for research questions considering the graphical features in their historical context. 4) Integrate existing tools for automatic analysis of graphical features into Monasterium.net 5) Study of the relationship between visual appearance of documents used in monastic live (secular and clerical) in the late Middle Ages and their production context

In the sixteenth century, Christian humanists, who desired to learn Hebrew and to understand the Masoretic text of the Bible, mainly relied on David Qim?i’s work, Sefer ha-Shorashim or Book of Roots (Narbonne, 1210). This dictionary, which presents, in alphabetical order, the roots allowing to group conveniently all the words of biblical Hebrew, reached an impressive amount of popularity among Jews in the Middle Ages. Qim?i’s motivation for writing it was to put the study of the Hebrew language within the reach of a large audience and not only scholars. In the Renaissance, Sefer ha-Shorashim became an essential instrument for the dissemination of the knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish biblical exegesis among the Humanistic scholars and the Christians Kabbalists. It contributed indeed to reshape the interpretation of the Bible at the time of the Reformation and it continued to be an essential reference for the teaching of Hebrew until the nineteenth century. The importance of this dictionary must not be underestimated: of all the translations of Hebrew works that have marked the history of Jewish Studies among Christians in the Renaissance, this is probably the only tool daily employed to have been preserved. Sefer ha-Shorashim was adapted in Latin by Johannes Reuchlin (1506), then by Sebastian Münster (1525), but also translated by various Latin authors for different purposes: Sante Pagnini (1529) was motivated by the desire to understand the Hebrew text of the Bible and to transmit his knowledge of Hebrew language to Christians; in contrast, Giles of Viterbo (ante 1517) sought, beyond the mastery of language and of the biblical text, hidden meanings (sodot) and kabbalistic hermeneutics; in Oxford, circa 1600, another translation was made by or for Henry Savile, one of the best known translators of the King James Bible. The fortune of the text is remarkable: it is extant in more than eighty manuscripts copied between the 13th and 15th centuries by Spanish, Provençal, Italian, Ashkenazi and Oriental scribes, a fact which shows a widespread dissemination throughout the Jewish centers; the numerous editions, or abridged ones, of its Latin version provides evidence of how it was received by Christian humanists. The central axis of the project RACINES aims at preparing the critical edition of Sefer ha-Shorashim with its Renaissance Latin translations. The project intends to offer to the scientific community and beyond, the original text in XML-TEI based on the extant manuscripts, followed by its analysis and impact on the Jews, in the Middle Ages, and on the Christians, in the Renaissance. Two editorial axes are envisaged: 1. the critical edition of the Hebrew text based on the most reliable manuscripts family with the possibility of consulting simultaneously the Latin translations, displayed on the screen for side-by-side comparison; 2. the further history of the text in the Jewish and Christian learned traditions with a more specific work around the Provençal glosses in Hebrew characters. The online edition of the Hebrew text and its Latin version will also allow the researchers to evaluate the influence of Sefer ha-shorashim on the new translations of the Bible in Latin and in vernacular, made during the sixteenth century, which was at the core of the religious debates raised by the Reform. The electronic edition, which includes a research on specific elements (grammatical terminology, rabbinic sources, translations of the Bible, vernacular glosses, indexes, etc.), will be widely open to the community of scientists, researchers, students and to all the people interested in Hebrew culture and lexicography, Christian Hebraism, humanist translations of the Bible and Kabbalah. Because Sefer ha-Shorashim was a medium of Hebrew knowledge, linguistic as well as kabbalistic for Christian Hebraists, the history of its text and of its transmission contributes to the knowledge of humanist networks in Europe.