Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevi : une base de données collaborative sur les exempla médiévaux

Medieval sermons brim with tens of thousands of exempla, the “exemplary short stories” frequently used to convey belief and morals to the faithful. Long considered a class of dogmatic, religious, and moral texts, they were mostly studied as a subgroup of folktales and fables in literary studies. With the “anthropological turn” in historical research, new attention was paid to exempla as sources of cultural and historical insight, notably by the historian Jacques Le Goff and his student-inheritors. ThEMA, a database of medieval exempla, began life in the 1990s in the hands of these inheritors, and has grown and transformed since then. It currently holds over 12,000 indexed exempla from the long “global Middle Ages”, stretching from Latin Europe to Byzantium to Asia, and drawing from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist sources. All exempla are carefully encoded and assigned metadata, and linked to keywords and thesauri, to enable researchers to undertake a variety of inquiries into these cultural artifacts. The most recent transformation of ThEMA into XML-TEI format, within a searchable database that provides powerful interfaces, has permitted the project to fully engage with FAIR data standards to ensure longevity and broader usability of the data for researchers and the general public