Over the past twenty years, the digitisation of medieval and modern legal documents has revolutionised the daily life of historians: hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts are now easily accessible. However, there is a growing lack of skills to properly exploit this treasure. FONTES, a European project in which the University of Fribourg is participating, aims to fill this gap.

The digitisation of sources is a real paradigm shift for the research world. Whereas it used to be necessary to travel from one library to another to consult archives - a long and costly process - today it is enough to type a keyword on a search engine to have access to the rarest documents. Digital technology has now become an indispensable tool for researchers in general and for medieval and modernist historians in particular.

"Accessible' does not mean 'intelligible
However, despite appearances, the exploitation of the corpora now online remains generally below their potential. There is indeed a real gap between technological developments and the increasingly limited capacity of researchers in the humanities to make full use of these sources. "The growing interdisciplinary interest in these ancient sources, and in particular those of a legal nature, is coming up against an increasingly marked lack of skills in reading and understanding them," notes Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, assistant professor of medieval history at the University of Fribourg and coordinator of the Swiss FONTES team. This is a real blow, since these documents are essential and extremely rich: they allow us to understand how our Western societies were constituted, functioned and perpetuated over time.

Strength in numbers
In order to overcome the danger of losing essential knowledge and know-how on a European scale, four institutions have joined forces in a consortium called FONTES: the University of Palermo (responsible for management and coordination), the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the University of Fribourg. This project aims to develop a multidisciplinary training programme (history of law, cultural, political and social history, digital humanities, philology, palaeography, diplomacy, sigillography, archivistics, etc.). It is intended for students, doctoral and post-doctoral candidates, teachers and anyone interested in history.

Expected results
This programme, which started in December 2021, is funded by the European Union and Movetia, the national agency for the promotion of exchanges and mobility within the education system. FONTES (FOstering iNnovative Training in the use of European legal Sources) is a three-year programme that will provide a comprehensive teaching programme for beginners and advanced learners. An innovative platform will be created. It will coordinate, collate and catalogue the project materials and the many growing and, today, still largely fragmented online resources.

Source: FONTES: un projet européen pour mieux exploiter les sources médiévales et modernes