Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)

• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485) html-text of Caxton's edition

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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.

Special characters

The text is a relatively strict transcription of Caxton’s 1485 edition. It is meant to help readers of Caxton's edition - 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 spelling. The printer used, however, simply his z, a character that looked like the intended ʒ, to represent the odd character. We followed Caxton and used the ʒ as z and yough.
• 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 over a, e, o, or u indicates an omitted next letter m or n. "Laūcelot" has thus 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 þ^e for "the" and þ^t for "that". Occasionally a "ye" was also used to represent the "þe".
• v and u were used as grapheme variants v at the beginning u within words.
• Capital I and J were used indiscriminately - our edition offers capital 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 s as the variant to end words.

Text structuring

• 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.

Sheet signatures and pagination

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.

Text improvement

Textual “mistakes” have been retained throughout. A moderate annotation offers “correct readings”. The html-edition can be easily modified. Contact us with information, where the edition can be improved.

Pronunciation

Vowels

The English vowel system went through a fundamental shift between 1350 and 1500. The table bellow gives the individual steps (ignoring that not all the English dialects performed these steps according to the pattern). The spelling - in Caxton's days closer to the pronunciation than today - does regularly give the best hints how a vowel was supposed to be pronounced.

http://www.pierre-marteau.com/editions/1485-morte-darthur/vowelshift.png

When reading Caxton as spelled, one has, however, to keep in mind that "v" and "u", and "i", "j" and "y" had their own pattern of distribution within a sequence of letters. Read u and i as vowels where you would do so in modern English, read them as consonants v and j where you would do it today.

A special problem is the final e in many of Caxton's words ("kynge" where we write "king", "synne" instead of "sin"). It is likely that these final vowels where no longer pronounced on a regular basis. It is at the same time possible that the pronunciations coexisted as they still do in modern German where one can stress a nouns grammatical case and thus the word itself with the lost letter ("dem Manne kann geholfen werden").

Consonants

Most of the consonants remained stable, the spelling gives indications of differences.

• kn was still pronounced with a distinct k.
• 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.