Castleford’s Chronicle – Digitale Edition, Quellenkorpus und dichtersprachliche Analyse
This project is dedicated to the digital open access edition, the sourcing, and the linguistic analysis of Castleford's Chronicle, a monumental Middle English verse chronicle from the fourteenth century, which is preserved in a unique manuscript in the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB). This complex text bears witness to the historiographical dominance of the so-called Brut tradition, which was crucial in determining the understanding of history in late medieval England. Castleford's Chronicle thus covers the legendary history of Britain, whose protagonists (e.g. King Arthur and King Lear) had a lasting influence on English literature. On the other hand, the chronicle also contains contemporary and sometimes unique accounts of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II (Peverley 2016). An easily navigable open access edition of this monumental rhyming chronicle, including a newly compiled source apparatus and linguistic analysis of the poet's language, is therefore of great interest not only for medieval literary studies but also for historical studies and other disciplines. For this purpose, the approximately 40,000 lines of rhyming couplets from Caroline Eckhardt's printed edition (1996) will be checked against the manuscript, converted into XML format and supplemented with formal and content-related metadata.
Dynamic and synoptic text presentations will then be available alongside the digital copy of the manuscript, source apparatus, glossary, rimarium and indexes of places and persons. In addition, new sources of the chronicle will be identified in a comprehensive apparatus. In collaboration with the Middle English Dictionary - MED, we aim to use this edition to develop a model for the extremely complex lemmatisation of Middle English with its highly variant orthographies, which may serve future projects. The project closely cooperates with the Göttingen Library (SUB), whose expertise and resources in making and curation of digital editions will ensure the long-term availabilty of the project’s results.