Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Note on the 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 relatively strict transcription of Caxton’s 1485 edition. It is meant to lead to Caxton's pages - it is at the same moment not the text Caxton would have produced with antiqua letters.
- Caxton's alphabet includes the old ʒ (yogh) as a variant of the - longer - gh (to be pronounced like the German ch in ich and ach). Instead of using a special character, Caxton did, however, simply use his z (ʒ) to represent the character. Using antiqua letters we could either split Caxton's ʒ into z and ʒ on the basis of the intended phoneme value, we could expand the ʒ (yogh) to gh (and use the z a a regular z) or we could use the ʒ (as Caxton does it) to represent both z and the yough, ʒ. We did the latter.
- Caxton used m- and n-abbreviations to save space in contexts in which the reader could be expected to expand the abbreviation correctly: a dash on top of an a, e, o, or u indicates in these cases an omitted next letter m or n. "Laūcelot" has to be expanded to "Launcelot". Our edition has not expanded these abbreviations.
- An ħ appears twice in conventional abbreviations of "Jhesus": "on whos soule Iħu haue mercy" (sig.ee1v) and "A Iħu mercy sayd the bysshop" (sig.ee5r).
- þ is a th variant; its use is in Caxton's text restricted to the conventional spellings þe for "the" and þt for "that". Occasionally a "ye" was also used to represent the "þe" - a special spelling convention allowed this in Caxton's days.
- v and u and i and j were not used to distinguish different sounds. v was the letter to begin a word with, u had to be used inside the word. The capital letters I and J were used indiscriminately as graphical variants - our edition offers capital letters I throughout the text; j appears - as in Caxton's text - at the end of words (as in the roman number "viij").
- Our text uses the old ſ (not to be mistaken for an f) as the regular lower case s and the (today regular) s as the variant to end words.
- The original paragraph setting has been preserved, the formatting is, however, harmonised throughout. The ¶ sign does thus appear within paragraphs, different distances from preceding letters have, however, been omitted. Caxton’s edition shows a number of variants in the formatting of headlines, most of them seem to be dictated by attempts to fill the individual pages economically. The present edition uses a single headline format.
- Caxton’s punctuation has been accepted throughout. This includes his use of "virgules", slashes, as commas of the gothic type font. This has been done even though antiqua letters, as used in the present edition, would have demanded commas instead of virgules even in Caxton’s time. Caxton's virgule proves to be a far more flexible punctuation mark than a modern comma would be.
- 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 and is to be found on the last page) and it did not offer a pagination. The present edition is equipped with an auxiliary pagination of the original pages in square brackets. The default navigation is based, however, on the original sheet signatures (given at the bottom of pages wherever a new sheet began):
- the book had a front matter of 34 pages on 3 sheets (with incoherent labeling of these sheets) and
- a body of 52 sheets, regularly labeled - of which
- 24 sheets are signed with small letters from a to z plus &;
- 23 sheets (the “second alphabet”) are signed with capitals from A to Z;
- 5 sheets are signed with 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 or rather 8 "leafs", each with a recto and verso side to be referred to: a1r, a1v, a2r, a2v, a3r, a3v … a8r, a8v etc. The reference to sheet signatures is of convenience wherever our edition is used alongside reproductions of the original edition (as available on the web in the EEBO-collection). The original pages offer Caxton's sheet collation on the bottom of the first recto-pages of each new sheet.
Textual “mistakes” have been retained throughout. A moderate annotation is planned to offer “correct readings”. The html-edition can be easily modified. Contact us with information, where the edition can be improved. --Olaf Simons 13:46, 7 July 2007 (CEST)
Pronunciation
Vowels
Consonants
ʒ and gh were pronounced as the German "ch" in "ich" and "ach", i.e. /x/ after the "dark" vowels a and o and u and /ç/ after i and e.
