Responsible Philology: Editing the Kaiserchronik in the Digital Age

This essay considers the problem of normalized orthography in critical editions of Middle High German texts. The conventions devised by Lachmann, Benecke, and Grimm in the nineteenth century have always been controversial, but the problem is especially urgent now that digital reproductions afford direct access to manuscripts. Drawing on their experience of editing the Kaiserchronik, the authors advocate a print spelling from which a certain amount of scribal variation is filtered out, but in such a way as to respect and reflect the historic writing system of the medieval manuscript. This, they contend, is one of the main tasks for a responsible philology in the digital age.