Romance — The Romanist

The Romanist — the Latin-to-vernacular continuum, charter Latin to Roland to the troubadours.

The Latin-to-vernacular continuum: CroALa’s medieval and neo-Latin opens the desk; late-antique prose, the MGH critical editions, and the Old French treebanks and texts join as their shelves land.

The continuum is on the shelves end to end: digilibLT’s late-antique secular prose (2nd–7th c.), CroALa’s Croatian Latin (a 976 CE charter through the neo-Latin centuries, dual-tagged with classical), the openMGH critical editions (the SS rerum Germanicarum first wave — Einhard, Widukind, Adam of Bremen), BFM’s Old and Middle French from the 842 Serments de Strasbourg onward, and the UD Romance treebanks (Tuscan charters, Dante’s Latin, Old French, Old Romanian) carrying the gold annotation — four gold-lemma languages: fro, frm, ro, ota.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these sixteen answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 19 September 2026)
`ud`	treebank	nc	wired · manual	76 docs / 325,533 passages
`croala`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	570 docs / 309,180 passages
`digiliblt`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	372 docs / 459,451 passages
`openmgh`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	153 docs / 36,143 passages
`bfm`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	219 docs / 333,819 passages
`cantigas`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	1,682 docs / 34,162 passages
`derom`	dictionary	nc	wired · manual	233 entries
`osta`	texts	nc	wired · manual	740 docs / 5,177 passages
`disco`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	1,215 docs / 4,527 passages
`ctilc`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	967 docs / 256,685 passages
`bdcamoes`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	127 docs / 69,812 passages
`corpus-corporum`	texts	nc	wired · manual	5,248 docs / 896,770 passages
`lo-congres`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	12 docs / 10,304 passages
`cv-sardinian`	texts	open	wired · manual	1 docs / 5,237 passages
`salom`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	1 docs / 10,685 passages
`aranese`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	2 docs / 839,816 passages

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): lat 6,343 · roa-opt 1,682 · spa 1,216 · cat 967 · osp 684 · la-vul 233 · fro 222 · por 127 · arg 49 · gmh 11 … and 22 more (nabu axis romance lists all).

The desk’s instruments

No axis-specific instruments curated yet — the generic surfaces above apply.

Working the romance desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable romance               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync romance                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis romance          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis romance                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis romance   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu search chevalier --lang fro      # Old French across BFM — Erec's chevalier at the head of the hits
nabu search ragusa --source croala    # Filelfo's 1470 Ragusaeis and Palmotić's carmina — Dubrovnik in Latin verse
nabu search --lemma miles --lang lat --axis romance  # lemma search on the desk's Latin — digilibLT answers at an honest [silver] tag; --gold-only narrows to the treebanks

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

“Who sang of Ragusa in Latin?” → nabu_search ragusa (lang: lat) — Croatian Latin verse from the CroALa shelf (live-verified 2026-07-25): Filelfo’s 1470 Ragusaeis (AFFECTUS RAGVSA TVAE CLARISSIMA LAVDI) and Palmotić’s carmina — the medieval-Latin edge of the continuum, positionally cited (d1.d2.l198) for nabu_show.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.