Guidelines for Transcription of the Manuscripts of the Wife of Bath's Prologue
Creators: name: Robinson, Peter
name: Solopova, Elizabeth
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 1993

description: A statement of principles for the transcription of the manuscripts of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. This is a discussion document, partly that we may explain to ourselves and to others what we are doing, and partly that the act of explanation may lead to debate about and refinement of our transcription of the manuscripts.No transcription of these manuscripts into computer-readable form can ever be considered “final” or “definitive.” Transcription for the computer is a fundamentally interpretative activity, composed of a series of acts of translation from one system of signs (that of the manuscript) to another (that of the computer). Accordingly, our transcripts are best judged on how useful they will be for others, rather than as an attempt to achieve a definitive transcription of these manuscripts. Will the distinctions we make in these transcripts and the information we record provide a base for work by other scholars? How might our transcripts be improved, to meet the needs of schlars now and to come? At the same time, we ask scholars to consider that decisions which may seem somewhat arbitrary might have a long history of argument and counter-argument behind them. These guidelines are based on our experience of transcription of the fifty-eight surviving manuscripts and pre-1500 printed editions of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The first transcription of these was done partly by us, partly by other transcribers. There were many inconsistencies from manuscript to manuscript, and indeed within manuscripts, in these first transcripts. We realized that consistency would only be possible if we established guidelines, to be applied to all new manuscripts transcribed thereafter and in the three checks to be made of each transcript. In the course of a first check of these transcripts, carried out entirely by the authors, we set ourselves the task of developing guidelines which could be so applied. This document is the first statement of these guidelines. We expect that the revised guidelines which will issue from consideration of this document will serve as a base for completion of the transcription of all the witnesses of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and for the greater task of transcription of all the text in all the manuscripts and pre-1500 printed editions of the Canterbury Tales. These guidelines are not proposed as any sort of standard system for transcription of medieval English manuscripts. Our task is the transcription of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and these guidelines have been devised for that end. Thus, we pay particular attention to transcription of characters at the ends of words,because of the bearing this may have on final -e and hence on Chaucer’s metre. Transcription of texts in non-syllabic metre or prose texts, where this is not of such importance, may be based on different principles. Thus, these guidelines may need modification when we come to transcribe the prose portions of the Canterbury Tales. For the sake of consistency within this Project, this modification should be slight and confined only to definition of new characters to cope with a possibly different range of abbreviation signs to those found in the manuscripts so far transcribed.