Appendix 2: Edited Transcriptions

With the aim of enhancing both accessibility and transparency, in this appendix I provide a full transcription of each manuscript copy of Version T of La Vie de sainte Marie L’Égyptienne (except for copy T-L) laid out in three columns with increasing levels of editorial intervention from left to right. By presenting the T copies in this way, the mediating hand of the editor is made far more obvious than in most traditional editions without burdening the reader with excessive paratextual notes.

For the T copies that have been digitized (T-A, T-D, T-E, T-F¹, and T-F²), links to their digital surrogates are included at the top of each page. With the help of these digitizations, readers may consider my transcriptions and editing choices with greater scrutiny, but for the far more inaccessible T copies, most readers will simply have to trust my judgment. Regardless, this appendix offers a complementary resource, bridging the gap between modern reader and medieval manuscript.

General Features

The line and folio numbering provided to the left of each column is specific to each manuscript copy. Breaks in the text column represent column breaks as they appear in each manuscript, and decorative initials appear in proportion to their size in the manuscript. Empty brackets (‘[]’) indicate a hole or other physical damage in the parchment, and in rare cases where text has been rendered totally illegible due to damage — such as in copy T-E — question marks (‘?’) have been added to represent missing characters.

Minimal

The ‘Minimal’ column closely mirrors the manuscript’s original text while implementing minor regularizations for clarity — regularizations that do not require situation-specific choices. Thus the letters u/v and i/j are standardized, and proper names like Marie and Deu are capitalized. Initial and final letter separation is not represented. However, word spacing and punctuation in this column match the original manuscript. At this stage of the project, the only abbreviation marks represented throughout Appendix 2 are ampersands (&) — standing in for all ‘et’ symbols — and the scribal abbreviation for both ‘con’ and ‘com’ (ꝯ). This minimal level of intervention allows the text to remain as faithful as possible to its source while improving basic readability.

Intermediate

In the ‘Intermediate’ column, scribal abbreviations — such as ꝯ for ‘con/com’ — are expanded to improve readability. However, all ‘et’ symbols have been left unexpanded as ampersands (&) since this abbreviation is still widely used today and, therefore, does not impede the modern reader’s ability to read the text or a computer’s ability to extract information from this common abbreviation. Similarly, numbering is presented as written by the scribe either as Roman numerals or spelled out in words. Other editorial choices such as spacing, spelling, or punctuation are excluded at this level, which focuses solely on the expansion of abbreviations.

Extensive

The ‘Extensive’ column includes the most extensive level of editorial intervention, regularizing word separation (with spaces and apostrophes) and — very rarely — regularizing spelling. The diacritical marks ‘é’ (‘e’ with an accent aigu) and ‘ç’ (‘c’ with the cédille) have been added where necessary in this column to help differentiate between homographs. Because I consider the insertion of other punctuation (e.g. periods, commas, quotation marks, question marks, exclamation points, etc.) to be an intervention on the level of translation, I do not add any other forms of punctuation here. This ‘Extensive’ column aims to present the most legible version of the text to a modern reader, while the other columns clearly show the steps taken to create this final level of legibility.

Nearly Diplomatic

For manuscripts T-B and T-F¹, where the text does not conform to standard verse lineation, this supplemental column has been added, presenting the unique way each copy was formatted on the page — T-B with two verses per ruled line separated by a punctus and T-F¹ in a continuous prose-like style with a punctus inserted to mark the end of each verse. These ‘Nearly Diplomatic’ columns present a transcription with the ‘Minimal’ level of editorial intervention but allow the additional benefit of helping the reader visualize the text as it appears on each manuscript page. With this layout, readers may more easily differentiate between decisions the copyists might have made based on the constraints of their page layout as opposed to their interpretations of the verse. T-F¹ has been digitized, making it easier to cross-reference the edited transcript with the source manuscript, but T-B has not been digitized, so this column provides a particularly useful supplement to existing resources concerning T-B.