L’écriture du monde (I).

Charters and « Romanesque » buildings were produced in large numbers during the Middle Ages. Using a theoretical framework and analysis tools coming from the data mining and digital mapping (GIS), the article seeks to define the links between these two structures, rarely studied together. By varying geographic, chronological and typological scales, we show that the distribution of these objects reveals the unequal social dynamics of Medieval Europe. The examination of a corpus composed of more than half a million of diplomatic texts and 8600 Romanesque buildings, indeed shows a close geographical correlation between the production of texts for the tenth and eleventh centuries and a high density buildings. In parallel, an analysis of the authors of the charters allows to show that this phenomenon is related to a transformation of social relations in this phase (X-XIV centuries), and a spatial reorganization. Conversely, unable to define a chrono-geographical pattern for the Early Middle Ages, the article concludes in the existence of another semantics for the charters of that period, which explains both their (relative) scarcity and their specific distribution