# Back to Dom Mabillon's Future: Digitization, "Auxiliary" Sciences, and a Collaborative Project

Sébastien Barret

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Sébastien Barret. Back to Dom Mabillon's Future: Digitization, “Auxiliary” Sciences, and a Collaborative Project. International Congress on Medieval Studies/Session 208: Digitizing the Middle Ages: The Impact of Digitized Corpora on Medieval Historiography (2): Textual Arguments, Gabriel Castanho; Nicolas Perreaux; Eliana Magnani, May 2024, Kalamazoo MI (distanciel), United States. halshs-04934172

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Submitted on 14 Feb 2025

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Back to Dom Mabillon's Future: Digitization, "Auxiliary" Sciences, and a Collaborative Project

59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Session 208: *Digitizing the Middle Ages: The Impact of Digitized Corpora on Medieval Historiography (2): Textual Arguments*, Kalamazoo, Mi. (virtual room), May 10th, 2024

Sébastien Barret

As everybody in this virtual room knows, digital technologies have been rapidly taking over medieval history for more than a few years now; or at least, ample sectors of many medievalists' practices. This is part of a larger process in the humanities, that is old enough to have given birth to internal and external controversies – not least on the very definition of digital humanities and their scope –, and important enough to have seen its very usefulness denied in mainstream publications. Digital methods in medieval disciplines have also had the time to give birth to sub-domains, for instance computational palaeography as opposed to digital palaeography; it should be noted, though, that this last example also implies non-medieval disciplines.

The so-called auxiliary sciences of medieval history – palaeography, diplomatics, sigillography, and the like – have been extremely receptive to digital technologies, even before the current, ongoing evolutions. This is notably true of my personal specialty, diplomatics; and I think this is an apt moment to pay tribute to pioneering French researchers in that matter: Lucie Fossier and Marion Créhange [3]. Beyond this tribute, this is also a good opportunity to point out the fact that approaching corpuses was already at the core of digital approaches, as far as diplomatics was concerned. To sum up rapidly, in the French 70s and 80s, the potential of digital methods applied to charters was seen under two distinct aspects: on the one hand, the possibility of extracting and processing information from the documents as a part of a given research process, and on the other hand, as an opportunity for archivists and text editors alike to use database structures as a mean to compensate for the material impossibility to publish paper catalogues or editions of the abundant late-medieval diplomatic material.

Diplomatics is exceptionally well fitted for digital treatment, because at the historical core of its methods lies the breaking down of a charter between textual and material components; [3] diplomatic discourse is understood as the combination of easily identifiable bricks – arenga, narratio, dispositio and so on, but also signa, chancery “beehives” or seals. Better still, those elements are so to speak inherently relevant, because they are derived from the very theory and practice of medieval
actors. This does look like an invitation to enter data in a database sheet or to mark up the texts along
these categories. A second reason for this is that charters can be easily seen as conveyors of primary
data to be identified, collected and processed.

More generally, so-called auxiliary sciences have also been naturally drawn to early digital
treatments, because they tend to rely quite heavily on the accumulation of data, even if tacitly so. For
all the talk about it being a gift, the famed and much discussed “eye of the palaeographer” does
seem to me to be relying in good part on the experience of its master, on the database in his head.
On a more fundamental level, we must remember that they hark back to Mabillon’s *De re
diplomatica*, [4] the founder of a kind of diplomatics that did not actually separate palaeography,
codicology, even philology from it. Being a set of methods developed to distinguish the false form the
authentic, it had to establish the latter in order to identify the former; that is, to produce data in
series to see what would fall out of the identified patterns. This is another reason why such sectors of
medieval history can be naturally drawn towards digital methods. Interestingly, these very sectors
have, rightly in my opinion, tried in various degrees to shake themselves free from practices seen as
all too marred by excessive positivism in the years immediately preceding the great onslaught of the
digital. My impression is that this digital allowed for a comeback to traditional approaches through
new technologies, for the better and for the worse, but more for the better.

I think the most obvious way to this comeback is the notion of data – which, however, I do not plan to
really define here, because I know this to be a quite complicated matter. At any rate, the importance
of it as a basic quantity of digital treatments does seem to echo the emphasis put on “facts” by
earlier scholars. At this point, I can bring in my first example from the works of the BeCoRe project,
which fundamentally aims at analysing graphical features of late medieval charters, but also has an
editorial part. Like many such projects, it relies heavily on collaboration between different profiles of
scholars and specialists [poster PDF].

In order to allow for classification, I have had to declare whether preserved documents were originals
(or pseudo-originals) or copies, or something else – at relatively short notice, and through the well-
known use of a spreadsheet [Excel]. This forced me to pay considerable attention to a differentiation
of a very material and traditional nature and, above all, to make it very clear-cut, going so to speak
back to times when the theoretical divisions between different states of the textual tradition were
more bluntly perceived. Paradoxically, however, in such situations, one possibility from the past
disappears: fidgeting around. Even the use of a probability scala (which was anyway not possible
here) does not allow for the level of nuances of a well-balanced paragraph on whether a given
document could be an original or not gives. I know, or I think I know, that “data” is not identical to
"entry in a spreadsheet". However, in my perception that it is a good example of the fact that the processing of digital corpuses needs a kind of formalization which is relatively new in diplomatics and, generally speaking, in so-called auxiliary sciences, but that this formalization, however, is made easier by the epistemological traditions of these disciplines.

There is more. It has been often remarked that digitization and digital methods tend to make individual objects less consistent, so to speak, or even to make them disappear. This is because it implies a shift from the individual document to formalized pieces of data as the base unit of the scholarly approach and of the technical pipelines which accompany it. This has, as often regretted by myself among others, the consequence of possibly stripping the relevant data of some elements of documentary context; but also the effect of allowing renewed possibilities for these pieces of data to interact and play together – and be brought together. Technically speaking, it has become easier to mix data from different sources, and intellectually speaking, this stripping of documentary context can also mean freeing from disciplinary dependency paths. A good, if marginal, example of this is that in the wake of the works on this same project, I have had to manipulate IIIF coordinates, bringing me into the realm of image processing, what certainly was not something I would have anticipated a few years ago. And the very question of data processing and object identification has brought us to work, very naturally, with an art historian, Martin Roland, who saw in digitization new challenges for the study of illumination, especially of illuminated charters, and works himself with diplomatists like Andreas Zajic. I would contend that the fact that we have to pivot around data has been instrumental in bringing us together, leading to common questions as this one [5].

For someone like me, that means the ability to return to what Mabillon created, or to something close. The respective sub-disciplines that were developed after him will, of course, not go away, and that is a good thing: but they will be able to combine and unite more than ever. Between disciplines, and between scholars, as proven by the fact that a part of our works was very much favoured by the data produced by the CBMA Eliana alluded to yesterday, which means that we also collaborated with her, Nicolas Perreaux, and many others.