A thesaurus of 11538 exemplary anecdotes from the Middle Ages: a multimedia, multilingual database of exemplary stories (principally aimed at preaching, however these stories penetrated all instructional literature of the Middle Ages, whether religious or secular).
The ThEMA database contains 63 different collections of nearly 13,OOO indexed exempla and tales. The database is a collaborative, international effort (all researchers are invited to participate). The exempla summaries are thus given in the language of the indexer, for the most part French and Italian. The keywords are rendered in five languages: French, German, English, Italian, and Spanish. Even though the base of the ThEMA corpus comes mostly from Medieval Christian West, other medieval cultures have come to be included: Russia from the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japan.
EHESS: École des hautes études en sciences sociales
