The Power of Lists in the Middle Ages – Polima

POLIMA is an interdisciplinary project (literature, history, linguistics, anthropology and cognitive sciences) devoted to the study and characterization of the power of lists in the Middle Ages. By analyzing the production, uses, and transmission of lists in the Middle Ages, it aims, on the one hand, to contribute to the study of the medieval culture of writing and, on the other hand, to treat comparatively the relationship established in the list between linguistic utterances, written procedures for marking texts, and systems for knowing the world and controlling possessions and people. The list is a form of writing common to a great many medieval textual productions, one whose presence within texts increases very sharply with the pragmatic turn of Western societies in the thirteenth century. Frequently used by those who wrote, the list was, in some cases, a type of text in itself and was employed in a great variety of contexts. These listing texts ranged from the arrangement of information concerning an action, a subject, or a domain of knowledge (for example, concordances, lists of authors, lists of witnesses, indexes, anthologies…), to the enumeration of the physical properties and parts of objects having material substance (for example, inventories, catalogs, praises of a city…), to the production of taxonomies (for example, territorial or fiscal lists). Due to the great variation in ways of connecting elements assembled within the same text, a syntactic definition of the list was chosen as a frame for this project. Any text constructed in paratactic form can be included in the corpus, which leads to the inclusion of what current usage designates, for instance, as enumerations, lists, catalogs, inventories, or counts. Project POLIMA has several complementary scientific aspects. The compilation and placing online of a bibliography and a corpus of listing texts will constitute the basis for collective analysis. In seven consecutive workshops, these texts will be studied. An initial topical focus will encourage interdisciplinary work and is particularly intended to test the boundaries of the poetic, didactic, and pragmatic; the focus will then turn to the combinations, taxonomies and aggregates produced by listing processes. From the results obtained, a collaborative synthesis on “Powers of the List in the Middle Ages” will be written. This volume will try to clarify the connection which links forms of thinking to writing practices in the Middle Ages, at a time of basic change in the culture of writing and a new historical stage in the system of communication. By describing the concrete forms that textual “disalignment” offered for organizing information and producing knowledge and by studying how these listing forms influenced the evolution of ways of knowing and of controlling property and people, the project will enable comparison between two historical turning points in Western systems of communication, the central Middle Ages and the twenty-first century. For this purpose, three main research focuses will be privileged : 1) long-term study of forms for classifying and indexing knowledge and heritage (such as tables, concordances, indexes, and inventories); 2) evaluation of the impact of the development and dissemination of listing forms on the processes by which texts, objects, knowledge and know-how are formatted and passed on in material form; 3) re-evaluation of the historical role of algorithmic thinking in the emergence of forms of Western rationality.