Les « manuscrits datés », base de données sur l’écriture

The cataloguing endeavour of dated and datable manuscripts in France has resulted in a two series (7 vols, 1959-1984, ed. C. Samaran and R. Marichal; 2 vols, 2000-2013, ed. D. Muzerelle). The current research is twofold. On the one hand, the exploration treats with the large collections of the Saint-Omer library and continues exploring the resources of Northern France. This research is accompanied by an autonomous, yet partly overlapping, research project on the historical library of Saint-Bertin abbey, funded by EquipEx Biblissima (ANR-11-EQPX-0007), which encompasses manuscript digitization, scholarly cataloguing, and editing ancient library catalogues. On the other hand, the research project ECMEN, funded by the City of Paris, allows to advance the research for dated manuscripts among the fonds “manuscrits francais” of the French national library (Bibliotheque nationale de France) and the study of vernacular palaeography. The accumulated data on dated and datable manuscripts and the photographic material constitutes a large database on which one can now address the issues of palaeographical classification and analysis in a computer-aided manner. Script analysis at allograph level may be supported by text-image alignment tools like in the Oriflamms research project (ANR-12-CORP-0010), and classification systems may be confronted with automated image analysis and clustering. The studies on script classification allow a renewed interest in the links between script typologies and text genres. In this contribution, we discuss the notion of “gothic liturgical script” by analysing the scripts in breviaries and the manuscripts written in textualis script. We demonstrate that this concept should be discarded for there is not one specific script used for biblical and liturgical books, making the term ambiguous. Moreover, the use of textualis script is reduced after 1435, but not exclusively to bibles and liturgy, and draws a larger picture of what can be related to a sacred space in the late Middle Ages.