An Electronic Edition of Piers Plowman B-Text British Library Cotton Caligula A.xi

FAIN: FT-55795-08

Carl James Grindley
CUNY Research Foundation, Hostos Community College (Bronx, NY 10451-5323)

An electronic edition of the important, alliterative Middle English poem Piers Plowman from British Library conjoint C/B-Text manuscript Cotton Caligula A.xi for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. The edition, the eighth in an on-going series, will take the form of a multi-level, hypertextually-linked electronic publication. An electronic edition does not suppress editorial disagreement or impose spurious notions of authority, as printed editions often tend to do. Instead, it embraces the provisional nature of scholarly editing. We shall make permanently available the texts on which future editorial and literary study must be based. Future scholars will be able to incorporate their own insights into the Archive. By tackling what is textually the most difficult work in Middle English, I hope to contribute to a model for computer-generated editions that will have value beyond the confines of Middle English literary studies.