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About the project

The project Connecting Medieval Music is a platform for the study of contrafacta in medieval Romance lyric. It constitutes a digital repertory of Occitan and French lyrics and Latin, German, Italian, and Galician-Portuguese contrafacta connected to the Gallo-Romance tradition.

Thanks to its interactive interface, Connecting Medieval Music invites users to explore the connections between lyrics across Europe in their geographical and chronological dimensions.

The project does not only consist of a list of known cases of contrafaction but aims to provide information on the formal and cultural features of each lyric: the circumstances of its compositions, the people involved, the events it mentions, the sources that preserve it, and much more. People, places, events, lyrics, and manuscripts are all linked in an interconnected network that reproduces a layer of Europe's cultural history.

 

Sources

The information available on Connecting Medieval Music comes from hundreds of sources, but the foundational basis for the Occitan repertory is the BEdT, which provides accurate information on the metrical relationships, place and date of composition of Occitan lyrics. We have followed BEdT, except where more recent research was available. The more useful resource for the integration of notices on troubadours was the Dizionario biografico dei trovatori (Guida - Larghi 2014). Linker 1979, checked against the bibliography by Raynaud - Spanke 1955, constituted the basis for the information regarding the French repertory.

As with all research on contrafacta in medieval Romance lyrics, this project is built upon the foundational works by Friedrich Gennrich and Hans Spanke.

A full list of the cited scholarly works is available on the Bibliography page. References regarding single items (works, people etc.) are specified at the bottom of the sidebar.

 

The digital platform

The Connecting Medieval Music platform uses MedMus – DH-DW extension for medieval music, literature, and cultural heritage, created by Stefano Milonia.

DH-DW (Digital Humanities-Data Workbench) is a Drupal-based software created by Steve Ranford (University of Warwick) and Steven Jones (ComputerMinds), first built for the project Oiko.world, directed by professor Micheal Scott.

The MedMus platform has also been adopted by the project Prosopographical Atlas of Romance Literature, with which we have had a data-sharing agreement.

The musical transcriptions, available for the Occitan repertoire and for a small number of French works, are embedded from  MedMel: The Music of Medieval Vernacular Lyric – Connecting Medieval Music's sister project.

 

The onthology

MedMus data model implements an extended version of the CIDOC-CRM especially crafted for medieval literary and musical works. 

Data model

 

 

Principal investigator: Stefano Milonia (University of Warwick)

Collaborators: Samuele Maria Visalli (Università di Roma Sapienza), Ermes Faillace (Università di Roma Sapienza), Giulia Boitani (University of Cambridge).

Contact: stefano.milonia[at]gmail.com