MeMoRam: automated search for chivalric motifs in open access

Abstract

The article presents the most recent results of the research carried out at the Università di Trento, within the framework of the PRIN project: Mapping Chivalry. Spanish Romances of Chivalry from Renaissance to XXI Century. A Digital Approach. The different sections that compose MeMoRam, the database of chivalric motifs, are illustrated in detail, along with the methodological premises of the research concerning the minimum recurrent units in the Spanish chivalric corpus, employing Digital Humanities tools. Finally, the study of a specific motif from the romances of chivalry is presented in order to highlight the potentialities offered by searching through the database from the user’s perspective. Among these possibilities, the multiple variants through which the same motif is expressed in a very large corpus of romances of chivalry is emphasized.