Notre-Dame de Paris and its cloister: places, people, life – E-NDP

The E-NDP project aims at renewing our knowledge on Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral through the creation of a collaborative digital edition of the registers of its Chapter, the community of 51 canons meeting three times a week on set days to take all administrative, financial and practical decisions pertaining to the cathedral, its estate and the society living in its cloister. This corpus of 170 volumes, spanning the years 1326-1790, and kept today in the French National Archives, has never been the object of a comprehensive study to understand the workings and history of this urban enclave and community which, up to the Revolution, benefitted from a total jurisdictional and fiscal exemption from both King’s and town’s administrations. The collaborative digital edition of the registers, along with the development of two other digital tools — the setting of the parcel plan of the cloister and virtual reconstruction of the Chapter’s library books, of which 350 volumes survive in Parisian libraries (the National Library, Department of Manuscripts and the Arsenal, Bibliothèque Mazarine) —, aims at highlighting the value of a unique part of our world heritage, by bringing together specialists of all disciplinary fields, from the history of the text, of the book, of architecture and building.
The collaborative digital edition is based on a process of handwriting text recognition (HTR), tested and supervised by scholars, researchers and engineers combining expertise in Medieval history, paleography, philology and digital humanities. The edition shall allow a better insight into the Chapter’s administration, into its economical and political power within Paris, and the relationships it maintained with other institutions in the city. More generally, it aims at unearthing a major source for the history of men, women, and children who, through their activities, brought a cathedral and a community alive, a place which was not only a centre of political and economical power, but a model for its architecture, the liturgy, the arts and scientific life, not forgetting hospital assistance with the Hôtel-Dieu, the main hospital of the kingdom, which was under the authority of the Chapter.
The digital setting of the parcel plan, supported by the Geographic Information System ALPAGE, shall deepen our knowledge of the Medieval district around the cathedral (i.e. all the eastern part of the Île de la Cité) in its material and spatial dimensions, from the 14th century up to the Revolution. The virtual reconstruction of the Chapter’s library books, of which Alfred Franklin has written in 1863 that it constituted ‘the first public library established in France’, shall allow a better understanding of the intellectual authority embodied by the canons of Notre-Dame, whose Chancellor was also the Chancellor of the University of Paris.
Lastly, the project will aim at valorisation of the results on three different levels in order to further it beyond its aimed financing: research, teaching, and reaching a non-academic public. On the level of research, the project puts into perspective its object and methods through an epistemological investigation and reflection which places Notre-Dame as an ‘integrative object’ (objet intégratif), according to the terms of the most recent multidisciplary theoretics. As for valorisation through teaching, deliverables of the different objectives are destined to contribute to the teaching of research processes through scholarships and seminars held by the different institutional partners of the projet. To reach non-academic publics, it aims at giving digital access to documentary sources of the renewed history of an emblematic monument, but also to information and participative tools providing insight into the means which enable the critical contruction of knowledge.