The Texts of BnF fr. 24432 A cumulative, work-in-progress digital edition by Sebastian Dows-Miller

Introduction

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 24432 is a mid-fourteenth-century Parisian manuscript containing 87 vernacular texts copied by some 11 scribes.

The codex brings together narrative, didactic, devotional, and lyric material in Old and Middle French, preserving both widely circulated and lesser-known works within a unified yet complex codicological structure. The manuscript transmits material that remains unpublished in an edited form, while also serving as a witness to several established textual traditions such as the Lais of Marie de France, the fabliaux, and the work of Rutebuef.

It is thus interesting for its palaeographic, codicological, and textual complexity, and yet has received minimal attention from modern 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.

Manuscript Overview

Table of Contents

Codicological Structure

The full, formal structure of fr24432 is as follows:

singleton (bound with 1), 1–5:8, 6:8 (wants 8), 7:8, 8:6, 9–10:8, 11:8 (booklet of 6, singleton, singleton), 12–24:8, 25:6, 26:8 (wants 8), 27–29:8, 30:8 (wants 1), 31–32:8, wants quire(s), 33:8, 34:8 (1, 8 displaced), 35–38:8, 39:10 (1 displaced from 34, booklet of 8, 8 displaced from 34), 40–42:8, 43:2 (bound as singletons), 44–50:8, 51:4 (bound as singletons; wants 3, 4), 52:8 (singleton, booklet of 6, singleton), 53–58:8, wants quire(s)

On the basis of this quire structure, the manuscript's contemporary foliation, as well as shifts in scribal hands, the manuscript can be divided into eight main sections, or groupings, as follows:

Based on the material, scribal, and textual evidence, it is possible to identify 11 distinct phases in the production of fr24432 before it left its scriptorium, namely the following:

1. The base manuscript (B, C, E, and H) is copied by scribes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11.
2. D, containing the work of hands 8 and 3, is inserted between the previously contiguous groupings C / E, having been removed from a different context, most likely a codex other than the base manuscript of fr24432, which was nevertheless produced by the same scriptorium.
3. A quire labelled m is removed from the previously contiguous grouping E / H.
4. F is copied by hand 9 from the removed quire labelled m to complete the text with which the previous quire ends (Messe).
5. F is inserted in the previously contiguous grouping E / H in place of the removed quire m, along with the discrete grouping G, containing Lucidaires.
6. Quires are removed from H at the end of the codex, perhaps to make space in the binding for the newly added groupings F and G.
7. Quire 26 is temporarily misplaced from the end of grouping B and is replaced by another quire beginning ‘pour ceuls’, which is removed shortly after erroneous catchwords are added.
8. Foliation is added to the full codex.
9. The table of contents is compiled by hand 1 and added to the beginning of the codex as grouping A.
10. Quire 26 is replaced in its original position at the end of grouping B, less its final folio.
11. The litterae notabiliores are added to the full codex.

For full details of the evidence supporting this interpretation, see my doctoral thesis, available in Open Access here.

Motivation

This site presents a work-in-progress digital edition of the manuscript’s texts, based on the full TEI-XML encoding of the codex that I produced by hand during my doctoral research. For a number of texts, this dataset presents their first full digital transcription, presenting material that has not previously appeared in scholarly editions.

Due to the specific requirements of the doctoral project from which these data derive, it was not always necessary for the encoding to be fully cleaned and regularised. While my doctoral project itself has concluded, the data therefore remain in development.

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.

These materials are presented in the hope that they will be useful to scholars in their current form, and will encourage further engagement with this fascinating manuscript. As my work on the texts of fr24432 continues to develop, I will update the data accordingly.

How to Use This Dataset

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.

Textual Structure

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.

Codicological Structure

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.

Layout, Paratext, and Material Features

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.

Editorial Interventions and Textual Variants

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.

Named Entities and Numbers

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.

Diplomatic Transcription

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 Edition

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.

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.

All elements marked with @ana='ignore' are excluded from both edition types, as are all <note> and <fw> elements.

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.