Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Note on text
The present edition has been designed for seminar purposes (click here for the printable copy text). Some remarks on the editorial decisions:
The text is a literal transcription of Caxton’s 1485 edition. A number of irregularities are, however, eliminated.
- m and n abbreviations (a dash on top of an a, e, o or u indicating an omitted next letter m or n) have been expanded; the text reads “Launcelot” instead of “Laūcelot”.
- The ħ appearing twice in abbreviations of “Jhesus” has been expanded to the full spelling of the name to be found throughout the text.
- The special characters ʒ (a variant of gh to be pronounced like the German ch in “ich” and “ach”) and þ (a th-variant) have been retained with the conventional spellings þe for “the” and þt for “that”.
The original paragraph setting has been preserved yet harmonised throughout the text. Caxton’s edition shows a number of variants especially in the formatting of headlines, most of them seem to be dictated by attempts to fill the individual pages economically.
A number of Caxton’s pages ended with headlines which were then repeated on the succeeding pages (Q1v, R1v, X3r, Z7r) – the present edition has eliminated these duplicates.
Caxton’s edition appeared without a title page (the imprint was to be found on the last page) and without pagination. The present edition is equipped with an auxiliary pagination of the original sheets in square brackets. The default navigation is based, however, on the original sheet numbering: The book had a front matter of 34 pages (with incoherent labeling of the sheets) and a body of 52 sheets, regularly labeled. 24 sheets (of 16 pages each) are marked with small letters from a to z plus &. The 23 sheets of the “second alphabet” show capitals from A to Z; the last five sheets bear double small letters from aa to ee. Each sheet (with the exception of the last sheets both of the front matter and the text) gave 16 pages - that is 8 leafs, each with a recto and verso side to be referred to: a1r, a1v, a2r, a2v, a3r, a3v … a8r, a8v for the first sheet. The sheet numbering is of convenience wherever our edition is used alongside reproductions of the original sheets (as available on the web in the EEBO-collection). The original pages offer the sheet collation in the bottom line of the first recto-pages of each sheet.
Textual “mistakes” have been retained throughout. A moderate annotation is planned to offer “correct readings”. --Olaf Simons 13:46, 7 July 2007 (CEST)
