Ut reviviscat TML!
We are a collective of medievalists active in Eastern Europe and the Far East. Like the scholarly community at large, we were stunned when we realized that the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, an essential scholarly resource born with the early Web and long believed immortal, had fallen silent, perhaps never to speak again. Unwilling to resign ourselves to such a fate, we set to work in utmost discretion, labouring for many months to identify and retrieve the TML’s data from the depths of the Web archives, and to restore them to usability.
Fenyx is not the TML. It is another thesaurus, one that seeks to present the same corpus of texts, inspired by the original resource yet without attempting to duplicate it. We believed we owed this effort to the many scholars who, over the years, poured their time, energy, and enthusiasm into making fundamental theoretical writings widely accessible. It would have been unjust not to honour their work.
For long-time users of the TML, the terrain will feel familiar. They will find here the essential features of the original: browse and search. We've even added a download section. In terms of presentation, we have aimed for clarity and robustness. The richness of the content made it unnecessary to burden the interface: everything is accessed through the small menu in the upper left corner of the page. Behind the scenes, we have introduced a few modernizations: images are now embedded in the web pages; we have also converted the entire corpus of HTML files into TEI format and rely on an XML database for the search engine.
Throughout our work, we discovered that the TML’s architecture was remarkably simple and that its technical requirements were minimal. This only deepens our incomprehension at the inability of its historical host to restore it promptly after it suffered an outage. No technical rationale can justify such dereliction. Fenyx would have had no reason to exist had the vestals of Indiana performed their sacred office. In the face of their failure, it became necessary for it to take up the torch. The ongoing service disruption likewise illustrates that the dissemination of such essential data should not depend on a single provider.
We affirm that our approach adheres strictly to the law. Beyond the fact that the TML, like Fenyx, was published under a Creative Commons licence, all treatises presented are in the public domain. Transcriptions of these texts, even recent ones, cannot, under European jurisprudence, confer exclusive rights upon anyone.
If we have chosen to remain anonymous, it is above all to avoid casting any shadow over the scholars who created the TML. Those who appreciate us will know us. The others have no need to.
To reach us : fenyx-group@pm.me.
Important notice: without institutional support and the result of entirely volunteer effort, this site offers no guarantee of long-term availability. We therefore recommend that all users visit the download section to retrieve the complete dataset that makes up the TML database and distribute it as widely as possible. The existence of many copies dispersed among numerous users is currently the best guarantee of preservation.