e-NDP
Notre-Dame de Paris and its cloister

The e-NDP project, led by the Laboratoire ICT-Les Europes and directed by Julie Claustre, is designed to shed new light on the history of Notre-Dame de Paris through the digital processing of the cathedral chapter registers. This 170-volume corpus has never been systematically studied. Yet, it records all the cathedral’s chapter decisions during its thrice-weekly meetings, including those regarding the management of rights and assets, cathedral administration, and organisation of the society that runs the cloister. The publication of the 26 registers from the medieval period (1326-1504) currently held at the Archives Nationales, together with digital reconstructions of the cloister's land and the chapter's library collection, 350 volumes of which are currently held in Parisian libraries (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscripts and Arsenal departments, and the Mazarine library), is designed to promote the value of this unique heritage by specialists in all disciplines of text, history, architecture and building.

The collaborative edition of the chapter registers, carried out under the CJM's responsibility, involves an automatic handwriting text recognition (HTR) procedure tested and controlled by researchers, teachers, and engineers. This procedure combines skills in medieval history, palaeography, philology, and the digital humanities. It will provide a better understanding of the administration of the Notre-Dame chapter, its economic and political power in the city of Paris, and its relationship with other urban institutions. On a broader level, the aim is to unearth a major source for studying the history and lives of the men, women, and children whose many activities organised a community and a building that was not only, from the Middle Ages onwards, a place of power and a centre of economic life, but also a model for architecture, liturgy, the arts, intellectual and scientific life, as well as hospital care with the Hôtel-Dieu, the largest hospital in the kingdom, placed under the chapter’s supervision.

The reconstruction of the cloister's plot of land, based on the ALPAGE Geographic Information System, will develop material and spatial knowledge of the cathedral’s medieval district, the evolution of its buildings and, therefore, of the entire eastern part of the Île de la Cité, from the 14^th century until the Revolution. Reconstituting the chapter library, which Alfred Franklin (1863) described as ‘the first public library established in France’, will provide a better understanding of the intellectual authority embodied by the Notre-Dame group of canons, whose chancellor was also the chancellor of the University.