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 literal transcription of Caxton’s 1485 edition. A number of irregularities remain characteristics of the early print:
- m- and n-abbreviations occur occasionally in contexts in which the reader can be expected to expand 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”.
- An ħ appears twice in abbreviations of “Jhesus”: "on whos soule Iħu haue mercy" leaf ee1v and "A Iħu mercy sayd the bysshop" leaf ee5r.
- The special character ʒ is a variant of gh (to be pronounced like the German ch in “ich” and “ach”)
- þ is a th variant, its use is in Caxton's text restricted to the conventional spellings þe for “the” and þt for “that”.
- The original paragraph setting has been preserved, the formatting, 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 a pagination of the original pages in square brackets. The default navigation is based, however, on the original sheet numbering (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 marked with small letters from a to z plus &;
- 23 sheets (the “second alphabet”) show capitals from A to Z;
- 5 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 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 sheet reference 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 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)
