This site © 2007 by the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Santiago González Fernández-Corugedo
University of Oviedo
In 1993 Ann Squires and Nicola Timbrell produced a Windows 3.0 version of The Dream of the Rood. As far as I know it was the first complete electronic edition of a Medieval English text to include facsimile reproductions. At the same time (1993), Norman Blake and Peter Robinson started The Canterbury Tales Project and started to set a standard for such kind of work. Soon Hoyt N. Duggan had in 1994 a Piers Plowman site. It was followed by a general expansion in several hypertextual formats, and I will highlight as examples of different types of interface The Aberdeen Bestiary (Michael Arnott, Ian Beavan, Michael Craig, Jane Geddes, Morton Gauld, Colin McLaren & Jane Pirie 1996), Nils-Lennart Johannesson’s Ormulum Project (1997), David Burnley’s Auchinleck MS Project (1999), and Stuart Lee’s Ælfric’s Homilies on Judith, Esther and the Maccabees (1999).
The 21st century has furthered technological improvements developed in the last two decades of the previous century that helped to improve the quality of textual studies and ecdotics. However, those may not necessarily mean a corresponding advance in methods and results in all instances. A review of electronic (especially online) editions of Middle English works seems in order to understand why adequate editions have become even more crucial for the medievalist than those produced in the 19 th century. The University of Málaga project for a set of scientific Hunterian manuscripts may help us to widen the scope of the nature and purposes of electronic editing for linguistic and literary studies.