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Motetus Medieval polyphony in its manuscripts
About

About Motetus

Motetus is a free reading room for the manuscripts of medieval polyphony: the images, served by the libraries that hold them; indexes to find things in them; and editions of single pieces linked to the pages they come from.

The name

The motetus is one of the voices of the medieval motet: Sub Arturo plebs, for example, is “a composition in three voices (tenor, motetus and triplum)” (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0).

How it works

  • Images stay with the libraries. The reading room loads each library's own IIIF manifest and image service. Nothing is copied here; the library's attribution and rights statement are shown wherever its images appear.
  • Every fact has a source. Dates, shelfmarks, contents and summaries link to the record they were taken from, with its licence. Motetus makes no musicological claims of its own.
  • Editions come from existing open encodings. They are converted by script and credited. Nothing is transcribed from the manuscripts for this site.
  • No tracking. No cookies, no analytics, no advertising. See Privacy.

How dates are given

A manuscript’s date is quoted exactly as the cited catalogue record or article words it, in its own language (“Fin XIII”, “13. Jh.?”). A date taken from Wikidata has no wording of its own and is given in plain English.

To sort manuscripts, filter them by century and place them on the timeline, each date is also indexed as a range of years. That range is a convention for indexing, not a dating: it is read mechanically from the quoted words.

  • Early, début, Anfang, inizio: the first third of the century (for the 13th century, 1201–1233). Mid, milieu, Mitte, metà: 1234–1266. Late, fin, Ende, fine: 1267–1300.
  • First or second half: fifty years (1201–1250, 1251–1300). First to fourth quarter: twenty-five years.
  • An approximate year, written “c.”, “ca.”, “circa”, “approx.”, “approximately”, “around”, “about”, “vers”, “environ” or “um” and a year: ten years either side. When the date also names one or more centuries, the approximate year is used and the centuries are not indexed: “XIIIe s. - XIVe s. (vers 1300)” is indexed as 1290–1310, not 1201–1400.
  • A decade: its ten years. “Before” or “after” a year: only that end.
  • Several dates, ranges or centuries: from the earliest to the latest.
  • Anything else, or a date given only as a century: the whole century, and the page says “Indexed as the 13th century”.
  • Where the catalogue itself gives start and end years as data, those years are used as given.

Who runs it

Motetus is built and operated by AEM Ventures SRL. Operator details are in the legal notice. The data and every licence are listed under Open data and Credits.