PSalteRATIO develops its methodology from the convergence of genetic editing and traditional philological ecdotics. It analyses the rationale of a multilingual group of 12th-13th century metrical psalters (‘First French Metrical Psalter’, ‘Second French Metrical Psalter’, and the ‘Middle English Surtees Psalter’), similar to the Huguenot Psalter in terms of form but different in nature and function. Research will explore the connection of these three texts with French and English prose translations of the psalms dating back to the 12th-14th centuries. The study will also address the use of medieval exegetical literature (both Latin and in the vernacular, 11th-14th centuries) in the shaping of these metrical psalters. PSalteRATIO is based on an Open-Access corpus, whose end result is the publication of a joint digital edition of the aforementioned three texts and an all-encompassing study of their literary and genetic evolution. The project will be undertaken by four French partner teams with experience in the history of medieval French and English (language and literature) and digital humanities. They will be joined by two independently financed international teams from Czech Republic and Romania, in order to open a greater debate in philology, translatology, and ‘vernacular theologies’, which will lead to a common ERC Synergy project proposal in 2026. The theoretical and practical aspects of PSalteRATIO focus on translation automatisms and clusters (chief theoretical interest); links between vernacular and Medieval Latin tradition; comparatist literary approaches; sociolinguistics; cultural history; prosody; codicology and palaeography; textometry; and lexicography. These aspects will be discussed by the six partner teams in a series of seminars open to BA and MA students, with individual and collective papers published in the open-review journal of the project.

The aim of the E-CCLESIA project - Constructing the church-monument through texts and images in the Latin West (4th-12th centuries) is to determine the status of the church-building in late antique and medieval society, at a time when it gradually becomes a metonym for the Church as an institution. The approach is based on the hypothesis that the analysis of discourses and representations can lead to grasp the nature, function and symbolic as well as patrimonial value of religious buildings. The aim is to carry out a detailed study of textual and iconographic sources to highlight the transformation of verbal and visual lexicons as an expression of complex thinking about the role of the Church as an institution in late antique and medieval society and the material and spiritual value of church buildings. An innovative research on this central issue in Western societies involves an unprecedented inquiry into the terminology used to describe the building and its parts, aiming to reveal previously unnoticed nomenclature strategies. This multi-faceted study involves the historical analysis of an original corpus of texts and images relating to the architecture and decoration of Christian monuments in the West. This corpus is indexed and structured by a database. Exploiting this mass of documentation will shed light on the concepts expressed in church buildings as a major cultural phenomenon, particularly in Western Christianity. The E-CCLESIA project is multidisciplinary by nature and examines building as a social phenomenon, bringing together a national and international network of experts in historical, philological, artistic, epigraphic, and archaeological issues. The project includes a component to promote the results obtained to the general public through a program of exhibitions, conferences, podcasts and articles in magazines for a wide audience.

Although the emergence of the individual in the West has often been associated with modernity, recent research shows that the last centuries of the Middle Ages played a fundamental role in this process. The EFFIGY project intends to contribute to this debate by examining the reappearance of the representation of the deceased on tombs, either engraved or sculpted. It will therefore attempt to shed light on the markers and factors of a display of the individual by examining a complex field of the elites’ artistic commissioning, at the crossroads between individual and collective representation, between temporal and eschatological issues. The EFFIGY project proposes to carry out a systematic study of nearly 500 effigial tombs produced between the 13th and 15th centuries in three key French regions: Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Pays de la Loire and Brittany. This geographical area is distinguished by the importance of the heritage preserved and by the presence during the Middle Ages of various religious and secular elites, which guarantees a complete and accurate approach to the phenomenon. The tombs will be studied in an interdisciplinary way, integrating art history, history of techniques, experimental archaeology, epigraphy, heraldry and archaeometry. The processing of the data as well as the virtual restitution of certain incomplete or dismembered tombs will benefit from the contribution of digital humanities. To meet its objectives, the EFFIGY project combines the expertise and equipment of three partner institutions, renowned for both medieval studies and digital humanities (Ausonius, CESCM and CReAAH-LARA). This consortium will benefit from the expertise of other laboratories from the same universities, specialised in 3D heritage restitution and materials science.

The ORIFLAMMS project (Ontology Research, Image Features, Letterform Analysis on Multilingual Medieval Scripts) gathers 3 public research units in Humanities, 3 research units in Engineering, Information Sciences and Technologies and an industrial company in order to enhance our knowledge of the medieval scripts and multilingualism through a new, interdisciplinary approach. Combining scientific, technologic, industrial and societal issues, ORIFLAMMS aims at analyzing the evolution of writing systems and graphical forms during a long period (Middle Ages) and according to their production contexts (informal, documentary, book scripts) and languages (Latin or vernacular). It aims at establishing an ontology of forms and analyzing the graphical structures of scripts and to upgrade a linear, textual approach with a visual, bi- or tridimensional one. This will give new knowledge for linguistics, history of scripts (palaeography, epigraphy, diplomatics) ORIFLAMMS will first gather and harmonize several research corpora, then increase and enhance them, in order to create a new Reference Corpus, covering the diversity of medieval scripts: handwriting to print, informal drafts to monumental inscriptions, from Carolingian times to the eve of Renaissance, from theology and liturgy to chancery rolls and accounts. This Reference Corpus, one of its kind by its wide content, will be of free access, and give access not only to images, but also to graphically analyzed transcriptions (allographetic transcriptions). The text will also be aligned with the image (with coordinates of pixels on the image). All data will be stored in an interoperable XML-TEI file, for long term digital information preservation and access. The Reference Corpus will create a concordance of all written forms in the Middle Ages. For creating this concordance and move to a large-scale Humanities computing project, ORIFLAMMS will develop innovative image analyzing tools: upgrade the aligning methods for image and text and create a computer-aided transcription tool for medieval scripts. This software will be open source and documented. Working with large-scale, rich encoded data and adopting new tools in the research community being an issue, the new software will be developed by the end users (Humanities researchers) in a consortium with a private company to make sure that it can be offered to a larger audience and meet the standards of ergonomic and usability. The innovative tool is not only about producing new encoded data: it is part of their exploitation. ORIFLAMMS plans a new method for the study of scripts: analyzing the graphical variability. The latter will be considered through image analysis on a two-dimensional level, and through computational linguistics for the variability of morphosyntactic and graphical codes in Latin and vernacular. The open source softwares of computational linguistics will be upgraded and documented as part of this project. ORIFLAMMS plans the creation of a Reference Corpus, with images of scripts and transcribed, graphically analyzed texts from representative places and dates of medieval culture, and in interoperable formats. It will create innovative, open source tools for image processing and analysis as well as for statistics and text analysis. It will create new knowledge about the evolution of writing in the multilingual Middle Ages. Il will offer new technologies and approaches for analyzing handwritten texts in a digital context. It will enhance the comprehension of the scribal processes for the anthropologists, pedagogues, neurocognitivists.

Produced during the second half of the 13th century, the Manuscrit du Roi (Paris BnF fr. 844) contains 602 musical compositions from multiple musical and linguistic traditions. The codex contains songs of the trouvères and troubadours, motets, instrumental works, and some religious pieces. Certain gaps were filled in a few years after the first phase of publication: some additional pieces were added, also from multiple provenances. By assembling several different repertoires and using multiple languages ??(Old French, Old Occitan, Old Gallicized Occitan, and Latin), the codex is an ideal resource for the study of secular sung traditions in the thirteenth century. The interdisciplinary project Manuscrit du Roi’. Image, Texte Et Musique focuses on understanding the crafting and history of this codex, both in its material conception and in the processes of composition of the works, as well as its modern reception within the contemporary musical interpretation of medieval music. The project also focuses on the relationship between secular and religious registers to delineate mutual influences in musico-textual composition. MARITEM will develop an Open Access web interface that will contain a musico-textual digital edition encoded in XML-TEI / MEI, a search engine that will provide the ability to cross-reference textual and musical data, an interactive study of the manuscript, and a collection of scores intended for interpretative use. The interface will eventually serve as a prototype for the publishing and indexing of other music in French, Occitan and German. The originality of the project lies in the study of this composite manuscript in all of its many facets, a study only made possible by new digital technologies. Medieval musicologists will be able to work together with philologists in order to offer new answers about the history of textual traditions, present an innovative perspective, and develop new hypotheses on the written transmission of texts and corpora. Musicologists and linguists will also find convincing answers to problems thanks to the possibilities for vocal experimentation, which have never been attempted for these corpora, in particular around delimiting rhythmic sequences in unmeasured monodies. The project will also renew the relationship between musical curve and the sound of languages. Thanks to MARITEM, the profane practices of the end of the 13th century will be better known, as much in their composition process as in the modalities of their performance. The different repertoires of the codex will here be treated as a whole, as represented in the written record.