from Medieval Academy News (Winter 2004)

Medieval Academy Electronic Publications: SEENET and Beyond
by Hoyt N. Duggan and Richard K. Emmerson

Collaboration with SEENET and Boydell and Brewer. The Medieval Academy will collaborate with The Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) and Boydell and Brewer Ltd. to publish scholarly editions of medieval texts in a digital format.

SEENET was established in the 1990s to gain the benefits of new electronic technology without sacrificing what scholars have learned about textual criticism and its sister disciplines. Its goal is to publish machine-readable texts with reliable peer-reviewed introductory materials, annotations, and other scholarly apparatus.

The Academy’s agreement with SEENET is modeled on our long-established book publication series, Medieval Academy Books (MAB), which is overseen by the Publications Advisory Board and published in collaboration with the University of Toronto Press. Like MAB, the SEENET series focuses on editions and scholarly tools of importance to medieval studies. And like MAB, the SEENET series is made possible by working in partnership with an established press. SEENET will create the editions, the Academy will evaluate and promote the editions, and Boydell and Brewer will publish and distribute the editions.

Electronic Editions Advisory Board. The SEENET agreement is the Academy’s first venture into electronic publishing, an area that will become increasingly important in the future. To prepare for that future, the Academy’s Council, at its meeting in Seattle this past spring, approved the recommendation of the Committee on Electronic Resources to establish a new Electronic Editions Advisory Board to oversee the Academy’s efforts in this area.

The board will consider additional electronic edition series, recommend readers for submissions, and advise the Executive Director on a wide range of issues, including additional electronic edition series, contractual issues with publishers, and long-range planning for the electronic publication program.

Advantages of electronic editions. Unlike printed critical texts, electronic editions permit users to focus not just on “works” but also upon the documents themselves, enabling investigations of scribal copies as well as reconstructions of archetypes and critical texts. Such editions have the advantage of enabling sophisticated searches, allowing the use of electronic concordances and collations, and supporting other forms of text retrieval. 

Editors may also present in full both “good” and “bad” manuscripts, permitting literary historians to study the reception of the text as shown by scribal changes or marginal anno-tations. Historical linguists may study developments in the history of the language through access to large databases of scribal spellings generated from many different and geographically diverse textual traditions. Scholars interested in stylistic analysis, using sophisticated regular expression searches based on full analytical and descriptive XML-marked-up texts, can make fuller and more complete studies of metrical, lexical, or syntactic patterning than are possible with printed texts.

The extremely flexible nature of an electronic text is ideal for representing complex textual traditions, even of works like Piers Plowman, where editors confront high degrees of ambiguity and uncertainty. Electronic editions will accommodate scholars who prefer “best text” documentary editions as well as those who want the best possible modern editorial reconstructions.

Goals for SEENET facsimile editions. Through its color facsimile editions, SEENET seeks to address a growing and fruitful interest in the manuscript documents from which we extract texts. With both the color images and the extensive annotations dealing with the physical aspects of the documents, SEENET editions enable students and their teachers to focus on the physicality of the objects studied, as well as on modes of material production in the late medieval English book trade.

Images of manuscripts have a role to play in the teaching of paleography, codicology, the editing of medieval manuscripts, and in our effort to recapture a visual sensibility attuned to the particulars of a manuscript culture. Since hardcopy black-and-white facsimile editions are priced in the hundreds of dollars and color facsimiles in thousands, the electronic format makes it possible—for a fraction of the cost—for students and their teachers to experience high-quality facsimiles of manuscripts otherwise unattainable.

Previously published SEENET editions. Since 2000, SEENET has published four documentary editions of Middle English works, all Middle English alliterative poems, in its Series A. The four include editions of two important manuscripts of the B text of Piers Plowman (MSS F and W published in 2000), the longest alliterative poem, The Destruction of Troy (2001), and the earliest long alliterative romance William of Palerne (2001). The A series so far consists primarily of editions of single works or manuscripts. In each of the first four editions the printed text has been accompanied by high-quality color facsimiles of every page of the manuscript in which it appears. In each case the reader is presented with a diplomatic transcription of the manuscript, a lightly edited version of the text, a critical text reflecting the scribe’s intentions, and a composite view displaying all of the editorial interventions in the markup of the underlying electronic files.

Series A is not confined to documentary editions or to poems of the Alliterative Revival. Currently in preparation for submission to SEENET are a complete textual archive of the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem, the Caedmon’s Hymn Archive, the spliced ABC manuscript of Piers Plowman in Huntington Library, HM 114, the Old English Penitentials, the Old English Monasteriales Indicium, and a documentary and critical edition of the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Other possibilities will soon be explored as an archetypal text of William Langland’s B text of Piers Plowman nears completion and as other scholars present their documentary and critical texts.

A second series presents various aspects of codicology, paleography, textual criticism, and bibliographic research. The first of these, The Dictionary of the Old English Corpus in Elec-tronic Form, ed. Antonette DiPaolo Healey (1998), provides search access via the World Wide Web to the corpus on which the Old English Dictionary is based. The second CD-ROM in Series B is Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, edited by Linda Ehrsam Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz (2001).

New SEENET editions. In autumn 2004 the Medieval Academy of America and Boydell and Brewer will publish two SEENET documentary and facsimile editions of witnesses to the B versions of Piers Plowman: The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, vol. 3: Oriel College, Oxford, MS 79 (O), ed. Katherine Heinrichs (SEENET Series A.5); and The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, vol. 4: Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Laud Misc. 581 (L), ed. Ralph Hanna III and Hoyt N. Duggan (SEENET Series A.6).

SEENET editorial board. Because the limitations imposed by the printed codex no longer constrain literary, historical, linguistic, or textual scholarship, the quality of electronic scholarship is a matter of urgent concern.  SEENET aims to redress the haphazard and inadequate production and dissemination of electronic texts by exercising the same insti-tutional means used to establish quality control in print contexts, that is, by the same standard of peer review before and after publication. 

To that end, SEENET has appointed an editorial board made up of experienced editors and scholars, including Peter Baker, Hoyt N. Duggan (Director), A. S. G. Edwards, Eugene W. Lyman, Anthony Faulkes, Ralph Hanna III, Judith Jesch, Daniel Pitti, Thorlac Turville-Petre (Editorial Secretary), and Joseph Wittig.

Proposals for future SEENET editions. Members of the Medieval Academy are invited to submit proposals for electronic scholarly editions to the SEENET Editorial Secretary, Thorlac Turville-Petre (Thorlac.Turville-Petre@nottingham.ac.uk) or Hoyt N. Duggan (hnd@ virginia.edu).