Abstract
Abstract This article first outlines the challenges involved in the editing of Old English anonymous and Wulfstanian homilies before introducing the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English (ECHOE) project. This new initiative at the University of Göttingen reverses the traditional collation of texts and instead celebrates the book-historical significance of every individual manuscript version, its textual and palaeographical idiosyncrasies, and its revisional layers up through c. 1200 AD. The project provides new forms of display to expose the complex interversional network of textual representations, and develops a range of digital tools to facilitate the identification and swift comparison of related passages. It includes digital facsimiles, palaeographical and rhetorical version profiles, and the Latin sources for each homily, creating opportunities for unprecedented research on the transmission, composition, variation, and performance of the fluid preaching text.
Highlights
This article first outlines the challenges involved in the editing of Old English anonymous and Wulfstanian homilies before introducing the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English (ECHOE) project
This dilemma surrounding the uncertain parameters of ‘text’, ‘authorship’, and ‘work’, which we have seen in Napier and Bethurum above, seems to have been responsible for the piecemeal editing of the anonymous and Wulfstanian corpus over the past 180 years: more than 80 different print editions – from prestigious EETS volumes, to single journal articles, to unpublished dissertations – cover about 350 manuscript versions, with some unpublished homilies still being only accessible as Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC) transcripts
One of the key features of the ECHOE project is the development of a specific search engine that is insensitive to the lack of a standard orthography of Old English texts
Summary
Anonymous and Wulfstanian homilies in Old English, composed, copied, and recompiled between the ninth and early thirteenth centuries, are an exceptional. This textual fluidity becomes visible in a number of recurring phenomena: (1) in varying demarcations of textual borders and a flexible length of seemingly ‘parallel’ manuscript versions; (2) in considerable textual deviations or macrovariations between ‘parallels’; (3) in frequent micro-variations between ‘parallels’ or even within one and the same manuscript version; or (4) in thematic echoes and eclectic reuses of specific textual units, sentences, or phrases across the entire homiletic corpus and beyond, resembling the (oral) formulaic nature of Old English poetry. A few brief examples may illustrate these points
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