Diffusing and Studying Medieval Manuscripts in the Twenty-First Century: The Example of 'The Charrette Project'

Whereas the printing press produces an infinite number of copies of exactly the same textual "monument," no medieval manuscript is identical to its source. Hence, despite the numerous advantages of printed books, they cannot faithfully render the fundamentally dynamic nature of medieval textuality. Today, modern computer technology allows us to work with manuscripts in their reality, not as they have been doctored by the procedures necessarily involved in printed editions. This presentation focuses on the Princeton University "Charrette Project," a multi-media scholarly archive that presents via the Web the eight manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes' medieval romance, Le Chevalier de la Charrette (ca. 1180).

First, I will present the various components of the scholarly archive. Digital color images of the Charrette manuscripts, now stored in an object-relational database, and indexed according to certain criteria (manuscript, folio number, verse lines of the romance contained on the folio, illuminations and/or capitals present,...), are at the heart of the project. However, current technology does not permit us to search text strings within an image. We therefore provide searchable "diplomatic transcriptions" of the manuscripts, that is, transcriptions that reproduce as accurately and as objectively as possible the information contained within the manuscripts.

However, if hypertext has provided new possibilities for the presentation of medieval works to the public, and thus changed the way we read, too often our methods of linguistic and poetic research remain the same. In the second part of this paper, I will discuss the linguistic and poetic databases and tools developed by the "Charrette Project" in order to facilitate a new kind of study of Chrétien's romance. By presenting a number of well-chosen examples, I will illustrate how using the computer can lead researchers to ask promising new questions they might not (and could not) have asked before.