Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Note on text
The present edition has been designed as a source text for a seminar I will offer in the upcoming winter semester (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 have, however not been preserved.
- m and n abbreviations (the letters a, e, o and u preceding the omitted m or n are covered by a dash) have been expanded the text reads “Launcelot” instead of “Laūcelot”.
- The ħ appearing in two 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 spoken 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 page (Q1v, R1v, X3r, Z7r) – the present edition has eliminated these duplicates
Caxton’s edition appeared without a title page (the imprint is 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. It does otherwise allow navigation on the basis of the original sheet numbering: The book had a front matter of 34 pages (with incoherent labelling of the sheets) and a body of 52 sheets, regularly labelled with letters beginning with small letters, followed by capitals and then by double small letters. The sheet made 16 pages, i.e. 8 leafs, each with a recto and verso side one can refer to: a1r, a1v, a2r, a2v, a3r, a3v … a8r, a8v. The sheet numbering is of convenience wherever our edition is used alongside reproductions of the original sheets (as available on the internet in the EEBO-collection).
Mistakes have been retained. A moderate annotation is planned to offer “correct” readings.
