Private devotional literature in the 16th century: The digitisation of Danish prayer books in The Arnamagn�an Collection (Copenhagen) and in The Library of Karen Brahe (Odense)

Abstract

This is the working title of a PhD project funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. The project concerns the digitisation of Danish literature and scholarly editing and aims to lay the methodological and practical groundwork for electronic scholarly texts and editions of Danish literature from before 1900. The texts chosen are a representation of private prayer books from the period of the Reformation in Denmark. Most of the Danish medieval prayer books have appeared in traditional critical book editions, which means that parts of the primary texts have to be pulled out of an apparatus. The post-medieval prayer books which were often written by women who were not professional scribes have never been edited, and until now have only been accessible to a very small scholarly community. But they deserve better. The textual history of the books needs to be told. How were they used and by whom? Viewed as whole books and not only as textual but also as historical witnesses, the prayer books can throw the light on the private religious practice of 16th-century women. The texts are encoded according to the SGML/XML-standard on the basis of the guidelines and the mechanisms for the encoding of primary textual sources developed by the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), the MASTER project (Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records) and the research project on Danish ballads from 1550-1700 (Dansk Folkevisekultur 1550-1700) based at the University of Copenhagen. The idea is to give a modern audience, both scholarly and popular, access to the prayer books in various forms: a manuscript (diplomatic) version, a normalized version and an image version representing the iconography of the prayer books and showing how the texts actually appear on the manuscript pages. Thus a mult level text representation will be adopted. The source level contains the original word forms. Abbreviations, scribal omissions, corrections and textual lacunae are tagged. This graphic mark-up of the source level is preservative to the physical information of the texts. The orthographically regularised level contains the regularised forms corresponding to the source words. A regularised representation is necessary in order to search for different instances of a word in the texts, since the orthographic variation in the manuscripts is great. The rather conservative orthography of modern Danish is used as the basis for this regularisation. The last level contains the lemmas of the source words supplied by the relevant word class and in cases of homographs a distinguishing discriminator. From this level it is possible to generate a dictionary. In addition to this multi-level text markup, metadata about the texts will be recorded. The textual hierarchical structure of the prayer books is encoded, and each individual prayer is provided with text-specific markup, typological in order to record the different genres of prayers, and structural in order to show the composition of the prayer. The opening or closing rubrics, a possible genre of their own, are treated in the structural markup. Finally a limited part of each payer book contains the markup on a stylistic level consisting of a topological (syntactic), figurative and, in the cases of prayers in verse, a metrical markup. Codicological and bibliographical descriptions of the manuscripts in accordance to a formal standard (MASTER) are included. The possibilities of new philological and interactive electronic editions are exciting, and give the users an opportunity to explore the text and the images and act as editors themselves establishing their own text.