The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is an ambitious collaborative project devoted to publishing in electronic form documentary and color facsimile texts of all the relevant medieval and renaissance witnesses to William Langland's Piers Plowman, with the ultimate aim of determining and restoring the authorial texts. The initial stage of the project consists of close transcriptions of the primary documents, although the project also plans to construct the archetypal or hyparchetypal texts of each of the three canonical versions of Langland's poem and, eventually, to create critical editions. This, the first volume of the Archive, published on CD-ROM by the University of Michigan Press for the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) provides a diplomatic transcription of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 201 (F) as well as a color facsimile edition of the entire manuscript, hypertextually linked to the diplomatic transcription. Also included are useful prefatory, introductory, and textual notes, along with appendices containing, among other things, fragments of the Prick of Conscience (Ushaw College, Durham, MS 50) which show the work of an editorial scribe between the final copying represented in CCC 201 and the scribe whose efforts created the alpha recension of the B text of Piers Plowman. In producing this volume, the labors of the primary editors--Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Duggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turville-Petre--have been supported by associate editors M. Gail Duggan and Catherine A. Farley, A. I. Doyle on the Ushaw fragments, and a team of graduate research assistants and computer programmers.
The result of this large-scale collaboration is an edition that vividly demonstrates the enormous advantages of electronic media for the editing and reproduction of medieval manuscripts as well as the difficulties inevitably faced in learning to exploit these new media. This CD-ROM edition is wonderful in many ways, but can also be at times frustrating to use, particularly in places where it remains wedded to "bookish" modes of presentation that do not translate very well to the computer screen.
First, the wonderful part. This CD-ROM offers a stunning facsimile of CCC 201 that is the next best thing to the original. The high-quality, full-color, digital images offer excellent resolution, even when viewers zoom in on details. Just how good these images are is made clear when you compare them with the sample image made from a black and white microfilm of the manuscript shrewdly included by the editors, whose original plan had been to make digital facsimiles from microfilm. As the editors note, the black and white images are unable to convey a good deal of the textual information encoded in color in the original documents, while the color images enable access to the text in ways previously unimaginable. I asked a group of graduate students to try out this CD-ROM and they were all impressed by the clarity and beauty of the images. Viewers can readily zoom in and out in order to move from small details to full manuscript leaf and can move up or down the page with ease. The device of a "grabber" (in the guise of a small hand) allows the reader to push the manuscript leaf around on the computer screen, providing a satisfyingly tactile virtual alternative to touching the actual manuscript page.
Most manuscripts of Piers Plowman are modest productions, presumably made for owners of modest means. CCC 201, which has been assigned to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, is interesting for what the editors describe as "its odd combination of deluxe features and indicators of penny pinching." The deluxe features include an illuminated and gold-limned initial with a portrait of the sleeping Dreamer, which greets the reader at the beginning of the manuscript, and consistent marking of verse paragraphs in alternating blue and red, or green and red, ink. The penny-pinching features include an uneven quality of vellum, some of it so thin that ink has bled through, and a quire structure in which quires were economically made up with the addition of two singleton leaves. All of these physical details are clearly visible on the digitally-reproduced facsimile pages.
However unassuming the physical codex might be, CCC 201 has an important place in the history of the B Version of Piers Plowman. George Kane and E. T. Donaldson argue that its had access to a manuscript close to Langland's original. If Kane and Donaldson are right, then CCC 201 has an authority unique among B manuscripts. As the editors note, however, that claim is complicated by the fact that the scribal editor of CCC 201 was a highly engaged and interventionist copyist, who made numerous changes to the text. The editors discuss the scribe's interventionist work in the introduction and throughout the textual notes that accompany the diplomatic transcription, which presents the scribal text with all its corruptions and emendations.
As one might expect from the distinguished group of scholars who collaborated on the project, the editing of the manuscript is impeccable and provides what will undoubtedly be a frequently used and definitive edition of the manuscript. The textual notes and introductory material are models of detailed and thorough commentary, offering a wealth of important information about the manuscript and its relation to other manuscripts of the poem and building a compelling picture of the importance of CCC 201 to the textual tradition of the poem. Valuable though all this scholarly information is, it suffers from presentation problems, since it is not laid out in a format that makes the best use of its electronic environment. Moreover, navigating through the editions and commentary is difficult, and to compare them with the facsimile images, which is what most readers will wish to do, is by no means an easy task. This brings me to the frustrating part of the CD-ROM.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the crew of computer specialists who worked on the project, the CD-ROM sticks close to a bookish format and hence doesn't meet readers' expectations for electronic visual display and organization. The preface and introduction, for instance, are presented as long chunks of text through which the reader must laboriously scroll. Flipping through a multi-paged introduction in a book is of course no chore, but scrolling down lengthy text on a computer screen is. An organization based on a hierarchy-model of text ordering, in which the reader first confronts an array of options and after choosing one option is led deeper into the material with information building up in layers rather than unfolding in the linear fashion of a book, would be much more manageable for the reader and would conform better to norms of electronic information display. In other words, a more genuinely hypertextual structure than the CD-ROM now possesses would be an asset. Also annoying is the fact that it is difficult to return to the main page or to earlier pages from within the edition or facsimile. A tool bar or menu that remains on all pages and enables the reader to move quickly back to earlier material--to return, for instance, to the discussion of phonology in the introduction from a manuscript page where phonological oddities crop up--would be very helpful and, once again, would take fuller advantage of the electronic format than the present CD-ROM does. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the edition would be much more effective if its default mode presented the reader with the digital reproduction and the diplomatic transcription in side-by-side format. In its present guise, the facsimile comes up first as a full screen; although it can be rescaled to fit next to the transcription, that takes time, too much time for the instant-access world of the computer. Additionally, whenever the viewer returns to the transcription, the digital image is lost, making it extremely tedious to move back and forth between the two. This is the aspect of the CD-ROM that my graduate students found most vexing.
Because the CD-ROM has wonderful potential as a teaching tool for both undergraduate and graduate students--I plan to use it the next time I teach Piers Plowman--it seems unfortunate that the editors appear not to have envisioned that student-audience among the potential users. While it certainly seems appropriate to envision the Electronic Archive as first and foremost an effort aimed at scholars and specialists of various kinds, that need not exclude a broader audience. Indeed, the nature of electronic media is that they can tailor themselves much more readily than books to different levels of users--precisely because they can adopt a hypertext model that lets readers enter into the material as deeply as they wish. With an eye to that broader audience it might be useful to add some additional contextualizing material--about Langland, about the poem, about the fourteenth-century context--to future revisions of this edition or to the editions yet to come.
As the editors observe, much in this edition is provisional, subject to change as they transcribe other manuscripts. That isn't, of course, a problem for electronic editions, which can easily be changed as additional information becomes available. With such changes in mind, the editors have generously welcomed comment and criticism from users of the CD-ROM and have set up a website for that express purpose. As this CD-ROM makes abundantly clear, electronic media offer unprecedented access to manuscripts and manuscript culture. They undoubtedly represent the wave of the future for facsimiles and editions of medieval texts. At the same time, this CD-ROM also makes clear that we are still learning to bend new media to our needs. As the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive continues to unfold, let's hope that it keeps refining its use of electronic media and moves ever closer to the best melding of pre- and post-print technologies.