An Electronic Edition of Piers Plowman in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.31

我们已经完成了一个版本的文本Piers Plowman，因为它出现在16世纪MS剑桥，大学图书馆，MS Gg.4.31。威廉·朗格兰的长诗是一首14世纪的宗教和社会寓言，它立即卷入了当时的政治，并被150年后的农民起义领导人引用，它作为宗教改革的先驱引起了新的兴趣。我们现在编辑的文本的特殊兴趣在于，它是这首诗的最新手稿，写于十六世纪中期，在宗教争议和争论的高度。朗兰至少为他的诗写了三个版本，但50多个手稿中没有一个是权威的。因此，对于Piers Plowman的学生来说，电子文本现在提供了前所未有的优势，因此Piers Plowman电子档案馆已经建立，其目标是创建一个多层次的，超文本链接的，完整文本传统的文本库，每个权威证人的彩色数字传真，以及开发一个计算机生成的复杂文献传统中传输的文本档案模型。这些文本附有编纂学、历史和语言学注释;它们可以被搜索和操纵，并与诗歌的其他版本进行比较。电子版满足了那些想要研究单个手稿的读者，以及那些想要最好的编辑重建的读者，这将在档案馆工作的后期阶段出现。与档案馆的其他版本一样，这一版MS Gg.4.31记录和注释了手稿的所有物理特征，包括擦除、标点、暂停和缩写、文本的边缘和行间添加或更正、抄写手或脚本的变化以及当代和后期的注释。文本的导言考察了手稿的性质和意义，既记录了Piers Plowman的文本，又在重新出现宗教争议的时代发挥了作用。它提供了技术说明以及校勘、内容、笔迹、标点、装饰、出处和装订方面的资料。对语言和方言的全面分析是对中世纪和早期现代语言发展史的贡献。对后来作出更正的原因进行了审议，据认为，部分原因是为了澄清，部分原因是出于对拼写的考虑。有人认为，生产的进一步手稿副本或印刷版可能已经设想。本版本和其他版本中包含的信息将为文化和文学历史学家提供永久有用的文本库，以及编辑，语言学家，古文字学家和编纂学家未来所有关于这首诗的工作的基础。

We have completed an edition of the text of Piers Plowman as it appears in the sixteenth-century MS Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.31. William Langland's long poem is a fourteenth-century religious and social allegory, which was immediately embroiled in the politics of its time and quoted by the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt 150 years later it stirred new interest as a precursor of the Reformation. The special interest of the text we have now edited is that it is the latest manuscript of the poem, written in the mid sixteenth century, at the height of religious controversy and argument. Langland composed at least three versions of his poem, but none of the 50-plus manuscripts can be taken as authoritative. To students of Piers Plowman, therefore, electronic texts now offer unprecedented advantages, and consequently The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive has been established with the goals of creating a multi-level, hypertextually linked, textbase of the complete textual tradition, with colour digital facsimiles of every authoritative witness, and of developing a model for computer generated archives of texts transmitted in complex documentary traditions. The texts are accompanied by codicological, historical and linguistic annotations; they can be searched and manipulated and compared with other versions of the poem. An electronic edition satisfies those readers who want to study an individual manuscript as well as those who want the best possible editorial reconstruction, which will come at a later stage in the work of the Archive. As with other editions for the Archive, this edition of MS Gg.4.31 records and annotates all the physical features of the manuscript, including erasures, subpunctions, suspensions and abbreviations, marginal and interlinear additions or corrections to the text, changes in scribal hand or script, as well as contemporary and later glosses. The Introduction to the text examines the character and significance of the manuscript, both its record of the text of Piers Plowman and its role in an age of renewed religious controversies. It gives a technical description as well as material on collation, contents, handwriting, punctuation, decoration, provenance and binding. Full analysis of language and dialect has been provided as a contribution to the history of medieval and early modern developments in the language. The reasons for the later corrections have been considered, and it is suggested that they are motivated in part by a desire for clarity and in part out of a concern for spelling. It is argued that the production of a further manuscript copy or perhaps a printed edition may have been envisaged. The information contained in this and other editions will provide a textbase permanently useful to cultural and literary historians, as well as the foundation for all future work on the poem by editors, linguists, palaeographers and codicologists.