from Medieval Academy News

Piers Plowman: The E Version
by M. F. Vaughn

As scholarly editing and academic publishing evolve in these early years of the third millennium, we face the challenge of making electronic texts at least as familiar and as usable as those produced under the Gutenbergian dispensation. Editors and publishers will continue to wrestle with varied forms and content, as they journey from the tried and true technologies of the printed book to the yet unsettled world(s) of digital textuality. We are not likely to achieve consensus any time soon on a single format for electronic editions, any more than we have managed to do so in the almost 600 years since Gutenberg’s printing press. No one format will serve every audience, though some of the boundaries that divide them may become more transparent and permeable as the increasing capacities of CDs, DVDs, and Internet Websites alter the economic and physical constraints on future editions.

But today that textual utopia is still over the horizon, and we go on producing texts in imitation of pre- and post-Gutenbergian forms. We consult individual, changeable, and not always trustworthy texts of a new “scribal” culture on frequently ephemeral Internet sites while, on CDs and DVDs, we see modern “books” replicated on digital printing presses. We may look forward, perhaps naively in these days of controversies over copyrighted music and Napster, to a time when “authorized,” relatively fixed texts and their descendants will be readily available in a universal Internet e-library, available to all to “check out” and use and cite as they need.

Students of medieval English literature are quickly becoming familiar with some of the forms digital texts can take, and incremental improvements in such editions will, presumably, be easier to make since the production of a new “printing” of revised editions will be cheaper (in time, labor, and production costs). It may be overly idealistic to think that we can accomplish the public authorization of e-books without the validation provided by publishers, but we can at least hope that scholarly publication may evolve more quickly with the new technology than have more popular, commercial texts, such as contemporary music and film.

As part of this evolution, the first two CDs in The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, from the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) and the University of Michigan Press, provide access to a wealth of codicological, textual, linguistic, and editorial detail in two very important manuscripts of Piers Plowman. The first is “a remarkably eccentric manuscript, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 201 (F),” while the second is Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W), “a manuscript important not for its eccentricity but for its central place in the editorial tradition of the B-Version of Piers Plowman” and “one of the earliest and one of the most handsome” of the manuscript witnesses to the Middle English poem. Offering these as the first two manuscripts of the B Version was, from a specialist’s point of view, an admirable (if serendipitous) decision. (The second volume also provides images of the last 17 folios of MS W, comprising its second “booklet” and containing Richard Rolle’s Form of Living and the lyric “Crist made to man a fair present.”)

The Archive’s ambitious project, to publish “in electronic form documentary and colour facsimile texts of all the relevant medieval and renaissance witnesses to . . . Piers Plowman,” is a laudable one, overseen by a distinguished international editorial team, led by Hoyt N. Duggan. A review of the first two CDs reveals the scholarly strengths of the proposed Piers Archive, suggests some possibilities for classroom use, and indicates some of the attractions and limitations of publication on CD.

These first two volumes of the Archive present well-produced, full-color images of two complete manuscripts. In addition to the full-page images, the CDs offer an impressive number of images selected to present significant details of scribal practice (letter forms, abbreviations, and suspensions) and of textual interest. These features of the editions can be particularly useful resources for advanced, graduate work in Middle English paleography and language, and in the study of editing Piers.

In addition to the facsimiles, the editors present careful transcriptions (marked up in SGML), which can be accessed through a number of distinct “style sheets,” so users can select (and vary) the level of detail they have on their screens. The editors also had the foresight to provide a relatively plain ASCII version of the text for those users who may be interested in producing a concordance and doing certain kinds of text searches. The transcriptions are lightly annotated to present essential paleographical, textual, linguistic, and bibliographic information, intended for specialists in Piers and Middle English. Nevertheless, these editions may also prove useful well beyond the confines of their primary audience.

Since they do not provide the sorts of introductory, contextualizing, and explanatory materials one might wish for beginning students, nor do they furnish a glossary (though one is promised in future), these editions cannot immediately serve as introductions to the content and meaning of Piers Plowman, but even slightly advanced students will find the editions and their introductions, notes, and images highly informative about material, editorial, and linguistic aspects of the B Version. Readers and teachers of Middle English poetry can draw on them to enlighten and enhance their labors in classes that seek to introduce or advance students’ knowledge of, say, the dialects and variants in Middle English, of paleography, or of editing practice.

One feature of the Multidoc Pro browser that is included would enable developments of additional materials for less-specialist audiences. The browser does an efficient and clear job of presenting the marked-up transcripts. Its “personal web” utility allows the user to provide additional notes and commentary anchored to the transcripts and images. According to the Multidoc manual, “The SGML/HyTime engine even supports the attachment of user defined data such as annotations, links, and bookmarks to any textual span or graphic hotspot using HyTime and SGML addressing.”

This is a feature with which I had not been previously familiar, and it is one that works straightforwardly and efficiently, producing plain-vanilla text files that can be easily edited and copied from one computer to another. (I had no difficulty linking notes to these CDs on both my home portable and office desktop computers, and the same links could be made, presumably, to another copy of the same CD, or to identical files made available on intranet, or Internet, servers.) This feature would allow users to provide commentary, notes, or glosses for others. I could even imagine the evolution of a public set of commentaries and notes linked to the text of MS W, for instance, which provided the base manuscript for both Kane-Donaldson’s and Schmidt’s editions. These could serve as an archive of classroom materials for courses in Piers.

When I set out to obtain a copy of the browser that I could use with other texts, however, I unfortunately discovered that the Finnish company Citec, which distributed Multidoc Pro, no longer held its license to use crucial parts of the underlying software, and so the future of the browser is in doubt. Luckily, other SGML browsers are, and will be, available for future additions to the Piers Archive, and the underlying texts will not need to be altered. However, the obsolescence of Multidoc Pro and SEENET’s decision to abandon the ACDSee image viewer it used on the first volume increase my concerns about publishing on CD with proprietary software.

There may be good economic and practical reasons for publishing editions in this way, but as technology changes and speed increases on the Internet, the main rationales for CD (or DVD) formats may become less persuasive, even if there remain economic and other attractions for such digital hard copy. CDs allow scholars to make the serious and extended study of these two manuscripts but do not facilitate the more casual sorts of comparisons a less-advanced (or committed) reader might wish, or which a teacher might spontaneously require in a classroom setting. These latter, of course, were not the intended audiences for these editions, and as the Archive evolves it may well embrace more fully the needs of such users.

With these two CDs, SEENET has provided the beginnings of a new, secure textual basis for future study of the B Version of Piers Plowman; on that foundation, editors and students of Piers will now be able to construct their own virtual library shelves and reading rooms. We look forward to its editors’ well-informed critical judgments about the next generation of presentation software. SEENET will play a significant role in shaping the evolution of publication in the present age of electronic texts, and even those who have little or no interest in Piers Plowman will benefit from its continuing efforts.

Editor’s note. For more information on these publications, see the SEENET Website: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/piersmain.html.