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The project concerns the electronic edition of teaching texts produced in the University of Medicine and Arts of Bologna in the 14th century. The decision of producing an electronic *critical* edition of the entire corpus follows by necessity from the very nature of the texts. Common teaching practices, such as the `repetitio', affected their production and transmission, causing each witness to by substantially different from the others. A reconstruction of the text by means of standard collating procedures is therefore impossible, whereas a database representation of the entire textual tradition seems to be best suited to the `fluid' nature of the texts, offering the most rewarding approach to their critical analysis.
A prototype edition of the first `lectio' of the commentary by Gentilis de Cingulo of Porphyry's `Isagoge' (first decade of the 14th century) has so far been produced by means of the DBMS `kleio', developed by Manfred Thaller at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Geschichte in Goettingen. The transcriptions have been structured as a database and the system allows the binding of structured portions of the text with the relevant parts of the digitized images of the manuscripts. Parallel passages of the text, together with their images, can be retrieved addressing queries either to the transcriptions or to the images. Further developments of the system will soon enable the handling of non-linear segments of the text (`enhanced strings' made up of sequences of characters and portions of bitmap), allowing therefore for the treatment of textual variants.
The long-range goal of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is the creation of a multi-level, hyper-textually linked electronic archive of the textual tradition of all three versions of the fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision P iers Plowman.
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This paper will introduce the work of the Canterbury Tales Project, and especially its first CD-ROM (on the Wife of Bath's Prologue, due for release January 1996). The Canterbury Tales Project aims at the transcription, collation, analysis and publication of all extant pre-1500 witnesses, with almost all publication (and all publication of transcripts and manuscript images) to be in electronic form. The publication of the project's first CD-ROM mark the first publication of a major edition conceived, from the first, as an electronic publication. The imminent publication of the first CD-ROM, which will be demonstrated at the conference, is sufficient proof that such editions are now technically possible. Accordingly, this paper will focus on the intellectual difficulties in our work, rather than the technical problems.
With the exception of narratology, which uses 'story' in a very specialized sense, 'story' and 'tale' are today almost synonymous. Yet, if we look at 'storie' and 'tale' in Chaucer's poetry, there are a number of significant differences between the tw o words, which have gone unmarked, or at best only implied in previous word studies and Middle English dictionaries.
This paper will focus on the kinds of words and phrases that are attracted to "storie" and "tale" and what these words and phrases may tell us about the meaning of 'storie' and 'tale'.
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