•A manuscript is not merely a carrier of the text; it is the moment in which the text was produced. Before the mechanical reproduction of the printing press, each document was the product of a labor: the ink prepared by hand, the surface cut from leather or papyrus, the letters individually formed. Therefore, a manuscript is a material event frozen in time; it is under the pressure of the pen, the climate that causes the paper to curl, the layers accumulated by generations. These objects that accumulate on the shelves of the archives of the Bibliotheque nationale de France speak as much about the text as they do about the object itself, and their digital transfer through the Gallica database of the BnF is the digitalization not only of a copy, but also of the historical weight of the document.
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