About the Manuscript ▼
The manuscript at the centre of this project is Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français, 24432, hereafter fr24432. It was produced in Paris in the middle of the fourteenth century.
The manuscript is the work of some 11 scribes, and contains some 87 texts across its 446 folios, all of which are written entirely or primarily in French. It is thus interesting for its palaeographic, codicological, and textual complexity, and yet has received minimal attention from scholarship.
In my doctoral project, I conducted a full material analysis of the codex using a variety of traditional and digital methods. The full thesis is available in Open Access here.
About the Project ▼
This page presents a work-in-progress edition of the texts of fr24432, using the full TEI-XML encoding of the codex that I produced by hand during my doctoral project. Given the specific requirements of that project, it was not always necessary for the data to be cleaned and regularised before use, so while my doctoral project has concluded, the data are not yet fully ‘complete’.
The motivating principle behind this present project is that a desire for data completeness, which remains the ultimate goal, should not prevent incomplete data from being published if they may be of use to scholarship. After all, completeness in one aspect of an encoding may be independent from completeness in another: for example, while it is not yet possible to extract a whole-manuscript critical edition directly from these data, the completeness of the encoding of abbreviations is much higher.
In short, this project presents these data in the hope that they will be of use to scholars in their current form, and will raise the profile of this fascinating manuscript. As my work on the texts of fr24432 continues to develop, I will update the data accordingly.
The texts given here are separated into three groups according to their status: Complete, Near Complete, and Incomplete.
- Complete texts are those for which I have completed a full edition-quality encoding, which is presented via a web viewer. Links are given to editions I have published using these data.
- Near Complete texts can also be accessed via the web viewer, but should be approached with some caution as they are likely to contain errors and may not yet be wholly suitable for reading. Notes are given to set out those aspects which are not yet complete.
- Incomplete texts are likely to contain numerous errors and inconsistencies, especially in the regularisation of punctuation, word-separation, and allographs. The data should therefore be treated with extreme caution.
All texts, whatever their status, are published in their current form in TEI-XML, CSV, and TXT formats. To download the full dataset, including a single TEI file containing all data for the full manuscript, go to the GitHub Repository for this project.
For further details of my ongoing research, see my personal page here.
Encoding Principles ▼
In the TEI-XML encoding, individual texts, and their incipit and explicit markings (linked to the main text through @corresp) have been separated through use of the <div> tag, with sections of prose marked using <p>, and sections of poetry marked using <lg>, with individual lines of verse tagged using <l>.
When a text is dialogic in form, this is marked using <spGrp>, with contributions by individual speakers marked using <sp>.
Direct speech within non dialogic text has often been marked with <q>.
Both <sp> and <q> make use of @who and @toWhom, where appropriate, and instances of <q> that break across structural divisions are connected through the use of @next and @prev references.
The few words and phrases written in languages other than Old and Middle French (predominantly Latin) have been marked using @xml:lang and contained within <seg>, if these do not align with another tagged section of text.
Material divisions within the codex have been marked, with <gb>, <pb>, <cb>, and <lb> tags indicating the beginning of a new quire, folio, column, and line respectively, with the latter tag marked with @break as "no" when a line break occurs within a word. <handShift> is used to mark the beginning of a section of work by a particular scribe, with the scribe identified using @scribeRef.
Additions and interventions by hands other than the main scribe of a section are marked through the addition of the @hand attribute.
The table of contents is encoded as a table using the <table>, <cell>, and <row> tags.
Labels, marginal notes, catchwords, and highlighted sections are marked using <label>, <note>, <fw>, and <hi>, with information about the location and presentation of these additions usually included in @place and @rend attributes. The latter attribute is applied to material and textual divisions more broadly, particularly to mark the use of litterae notabiliores, or to indicate the exact manner in which text is added or deleted.
Meanwhile, moments of damage, blank spaces, and gaps in text are marked using <damage>, <space>, and <gap> respectively.
In the latter case, details such as the @agent, @extent, @quantity, and @reason behind the gap are marked.
All material and textual divisions are given a unique identifier through the use of @xml:id.
Within the text of the encoding, expansions of scribal abbreviation, additions and deletions by scribal or later hands, as well as editorial regularisations, corrections, suppressions, and insertions have been encoded using the <expan>, <add>, <del>, <reg>, <corr>, <surplus>, and <supplied> elements respectively, alongside the unexpanded, unregularised, and uncorrected version of the text, through the <abbr>, <orig>, and <sic> elements respectively.
Such modifications are marked with @resp to indicate the responsible party, where this is known.
Where more than one variant of the same segment of text has been encoded, for example in cases of expanded abbreviation, correction, and regularisation, the variants have been contained within a <choice> element.
Again, where such details have been pertinent to our analysis, personal and geographic names have been encoded within <persName> and <placeName>, each referring to an associated identifier using @ref.
Dates are encoded in <date>, usually with an @when attribute to present the date in a machine readable format, and <num> elements are encoded with their associated @value, to enable machine reading of complex numeral sequences.
Editorial Principles ▼
Diplomatic transcriptions have been extracted from the TEI-XML encoding by ignoring all <expan>, <reg>, <corr>, <add>, and <supplied> elements, unless they are marked with @ana='retain'.
The resulting text mimics, as far as possible, allographic variation on the manuscript page, and retains original word separation and punctuation (the punctus elevatus is represented by a modern semi-colon), with the exception of the inverted comma, which is generally included for clarity.
All later modifications to the text, including by early correctors, are ignored.
Critical editions have been extracted from the TEI-XML encoding by ignoring all <abbr>, <orig>, <sic>, <del>, and <surplus> elements, unless they are marked with @ana='retain'.
The resulting text simplifies allographic variation for r and s, regularises the use of u and v as in Modern French, modernises punctuation, and adds diacritical marks where these provide a clearer idea of pronunciation (predominantly through the use of the acute accent to mark otherwise ambiguous tonic e, and the use of the trema to indicate diaeresis).
Later modifications to the text are accepted in cases of clear scribal error, to which I occasionally add my own editorial interventions.
All elements marked with @ana='ignore' are excluded from both edition types, as are all <note> and <fw> elements.
Note that I use the term critical edition here as a shorthand for a single-manuscript critical edition, which does not attempt to incorporate lessons from other copies of a given text which may exist outside of fr24432. For details of such witnesses, where they exist, see the links provided to the Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA) database.
Licensing ▼
Unless otherwise stated, all TEI-XML, CSV, TXT, and HTML outputs presented on this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence.
This licence allows you to copy, redistribute, adapt, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including commercial use, provided that you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same licence as the original.
When citing or reusing these materials, please attribute them to the project and provide a link back to this website, an archived copy, or the GitHub repository hosting the source data.
