Skills session: a round-table on editing medieval texts

This skills session is particularly designed to be of use to our postgraduate and early career researchers, but will be of interest to all colleagues with an interest in editing medieval texts of a variety of kinds.  Even if you do not plan to edit texts as part of your own research, hearing about how editors go about their work may be help inform your own approaches to published editions.

• Dr. Gregory Lippiatt is currently producing an edition, translation, and commentary on the Statutes of Pamiers (1212), a set of legal customs governing the lands conquered by the Albigensian Crusade and intended to implement a reformed Christian republic.  This work has involved multiple manuscript traditions, including a problematic 'original' engrossment that has deceived previous transcribers!
• Prof. Tom Hinton is in the closing stages of a digital edition of Walter de Bibbesworth's Tretiz, the earliest French language-learning text. The digital edition format, underpinned by TEI-XML, allows access to the whole MS tradition of 17 copies of the text, comparison between different versions of the text (and between transcription and MS image), and enhanced functionality.
• Prof. Catherine Rider has edited two short thirteenth-century confession manuals, designed to teach priests how to hear confessions. This is a genre where the manuscripts vary considerably and so traditional methods of textual criticism often do not work very well. She has also done editorial work on a medieval medical text which lists Remedies against Magic, and co-edited a seventeenth-century Inquisition trial of a magic practitioner, Sellem bin al-Sheikh Mansur.
• Dr. Loreto Romero is preparing a new edition of Triunfo de amor, a late fifteenth-century Spanish romance. The work, attributed to courtier Juan de Flores, survives in two manuscripts. Using Transkribus machine learning technology, she is transcribing the more complete manuscript, though textual flaws complicate its selection as the base text.