The project is dedicated to one of the richest documentary collections ever accumulated on the history of families, territories and medieval and modern heritage: the collection of the 17th century antiquarian, F.-R. de Gaignières (1642-1715). Anxious to describe a world that could disappear, Gaignières travelled around in France with a draughtsman and a copyist, recording texts and monuments on paper. His archival harvest is considerable. He went through the charters of dozens of abbeys, bishoprics and seigniorial castles, copying the acts, indexing the names of the actors and places mentioned, and very precisely recording the attached seals, whose materiality (material, colour and attachment) he described. The project proposes to deal specifically with the seals drawn from the collections of ecclesiastical history preserved at the BnF, which mainly contain records of acts and charters from the medieval period. These seal drawings will be processed and indexed in the online database COLLECTA - dedicated to the Gaignières collection -, in interaction with the SIGILLA database - dedicated to seals (EPHE) -, the person authority database BIBALE (IRHT), and the iconographic database MANDRAGORE (BnF).
