Circulation of Knowledge in the Middle Ages in the 12th Century. New Tools, New Perspectives, New Hypotheses. – CiSaMe

The project "Circulation des Savoirs Médiévaux - CiSaMe" aims at renewing in depth the history of the circulation of knowledge - legal, theological and philosophical - during a long twelfth century (1050-1220), upstream of the institutionalization of disciplines within the medieval university. It intends to analyze with an unprecedented precision the influences, hybridizations and transfers between knowledges thanks to the crossed study of the manuscript traditions of the jurists, theologians and artists and thus to reassess the process of formation and singularization of the disciplines and schools.
To do so, it relies on the combination of three factors: the mobilization of a multidisciplinary team with complementary competences; the collection of sources on an unprecedented scale; the use of an innovative method based on digital humanities.
The originality of CiSaMe lies in the implementation of a methodology based on the constitution and exploitation of a database from a corpus of manuscripts, mostly unpublished. These manuscripts, which belong to supposedly distinct traditions, will for the first time be the object of an automated analysis allowing to identify convergences, interactions or singularities.
CiSaMe associates three partner laboratories (UMR DRES, EA PoLeN, UMR LEM) whose complementary skills cover the disciplines mobilized by the project (legal history, history of theology, history of philosophy, paleography, prosopography, codicology) and the field of digital humanities. The project also relies on a network of internationally renowned experts.
The results of the project will be widely disseminated to the scientific community in web and paper formats (books, papers).