(In progress)
All Strangeness on the Ground: Translating the Middle English Poetry of Charles d'Orleans (Into XML)
This is a Git repository for the ongoing study of British Library Harley MS 682, the Middle English poetry of Charles d'Orleans.
The purpose of this project is to transcribe and produce an online version of the text of Harley MS 682. I began working on this manuscript in 2018 for my senior honors project for my BA in history (2019, Indiana University). The original project was to translate the first poem cycle of the manuscript (two introductory narrative poems and 74 ballades, about 1000 lines) into present day English, presented with a paper explaining the process and my findings. At the time, I only had the transcription in Mary-Jo Arn's 1994 edition Fortunes Stabilnes to work from, it was only a year after my project that the BL digitized the manuscript and made it available online.
- Transcribe the text from the manuscript
- Create XML files of the text
- Compile a corpus of Charles's English
- Translate the ME text into Present Day English (a continuation of an earilier project, originally based on the transcription in Fortunes Stabilnes (Arn, 1994)
- Produce an online version of the text for other readers
Transcriptions are made from the scans of BL MS Harley 682, available on the British Library's website. All characters are transcribed as seen, when possible. Characters that cannot be rendered in Unicode should be expanded. This transcription follows the guidelines in Introduction to Manuscript Studies by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham (Cornell, 2007). The exception is in expansion of abbreviations, and as mentioned above, if possible, they are to be kept. The purpose of this transcription is not neccessarily readability, rather a sufficeintly faithful text of the manuscript.
Files should be in well-formed and valid XML and either consist of one folio (page) per file, or one poem. The divisions are still TBA since the MS consists of 294 folios, so one file per folio may not be feasable.
As listed in the "Current Goals" section, after completing the transcription, I plan on making a corpus of the text, which will hopefully aid studends of Middle English. I'd also like to finish my translation, which I began in 2018 and have put on hold for the time being.
London, British Library Harley MS 682
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Fr 25458
Arn, Mary-Jo. Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love: A Critical Edition. Vol. 138. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies: Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1994.
Orléans, Charles d’. The Poetry of Charles d’Orleans and His Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS. Fr. 25458, Charles d’Orleans’s Personal Manuscript. Edited by John Fox and Mary-Jo Arn. Translated by R. Barton Palmer. Vol. 383. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Brepols, 2010.
TBA
Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2007.