ACTÉPI - French episcopal acta of the Middle Ages: a multi-media edition and analysis Keywords: History, Middle Ages, France, culture, written word, documentary practices, charters, diplomatics, bishops, chanceries, corpus, digital edition, multi-media publication Funding requested: 291 553,56 euros Project start: 1 January 2019 – Project end: 31 December 2022 Partners: CRAHAM (UMR 6573, Caen), POLEN (EA 4710, Orléans), CRULH (EA 3945, Lorraine), ARCHE (EA 3400, Strasbourg), TEMPORA (EA 7468, Rennes) ACTÉPI concerns the episcopal acta of northern France from the middle of the 11th century to the middle of the 13th. It has two main objectives: 1. In the first instance, it will bring together and edit the episcopal acta, currently scattered throughout various archives, of 25 dioceses (around 8000 acta in total), which, unlike in England, have been the object of little historical study in France (only 3 French collections of acta published, compared to 45 in England). Each act will be edited according to critical standards, and will be accompanied by dating information, a summary of the contents in French, a schema of the manuscript tradition, critical notes, and variants. Every edited act will then be encoded in XML-TEI using the E-Cartae program, which will allow for 25 collections to be published, from a single source file, both in print (via the Presses Universitaires de Caen) and online (via the E-Cartae website). One of the project’s aims is to increase the use of the TEI within the academic community. All person and place names mentioned in the acta will be identified and digitally indexed using external XML-TEI files (thesauri), which are those used by Equipex Biblissima and the COSME consortium (TGIR Huma-Num). ACTÉPI will, for the first time, bring together the qualitative approaches typical of critical editions and the quantitative methodology of a database in order to create reliable texts, which are accompanied by all the necessary contextual data. 2. ACTÉPI’s second objective is to use the digital editions of the 25 collections, which can be systematically searched and sorted, to shed light on various issues relating to religious history and that of the written word. The project will explore three lines of enquiry. The first looks to understand better the role played by episcopal chanceries in the documentary change of the long 12th century, which saw a shift from narrative forms to increasingly standardised acts. The external and internal characteristics of the acta will be studied in detail in order to identify those acts produced by the episcopal chanceries, which in turn will allow for the chronological development of the specific practices of these chanceries to be established. The second line of enquiry will attempt to identify the various networks and communities of which the medieval bishops of northern France formed a part. Conversely, it will also look to identify those with whom the bishops came into conflict. This will allow for a better understanding of the bishops’ reforming tendencies and power relations, not just within their diocese, but also their ecclesiastical province and the wider world. Those concepts that shed light on cooperative and hierarchical power structures will also be examined. The third line of enquiry, located at the intersection of the previous two, concerns the nature of documentary power, in particular the synergies and conflicts inherent in textual production, which emerged both within the diocese and the province at a time when societal needs were driving the creation of a market of the written word. The role played by episcopal chanceries in the production of documents for third parties will also be examined, by comparing and contrasting the 25 collections with other archives. The project will also include the creation of a research blog on hypotheses.org, the publication of a collection of translated sources, and an exhibition dedicated to the bishops of Normandy.