The Canterbury Roll: A Digital Edition. http://canterburyroll.canterbury.ac.nz

It is commonly acknowledged that medieval manuscripts are more easily accessible to researchers and the wider public once they are digitized or edited. It is less common to view the process of digitization and editing as a tool for enabling greater access. Yet The Canterbury Roll: A Digital Edition demonstrates that it can facilitate access to not just the manuscript’s contents but also the skills that underpin archival scholarship. By supporting student participation at every level, from undergraduate to doctoral, the project of digitizing the Canterbury Roll, one of the few medieval manuscripts housed in New Zealand (Christchurch, University of Canterbury, MS 1), has created opportunities for valuable training in paleography, medieval Latin, and digital humanities. The edition will certainly make the manuscript more accessible to scholars and interested readers, but I hope that the project’s wider impact will be pedagogical.

The Canterbury Roll: A Digital Edition is an international collaboration based at the University of Canterbury (UC) in New Zealand. Its contributors come from UC’s history department, its Arts Digital Lab, and its internship program as well as from Collaborative Research Centre 933 at Heidelberg University in Germany and Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom. The edition forms the centerpiece of an ongoing project to reedit and recontextualize this fifteenth-century English genealogical roll in light of significant advances in our understanding of such texts since 1919, when Arnold Wall first edited it. The first portion of the Canterbury Roll, a representative of the “Noah” group of English royal genealogies, begins with Noah and traces his descendants and the succession of English kings to Henry V—a version of English royal history that supports the Lancastrian claim to the throne. A later scribe, apparently with Yorkist sympathies, extended the genealogy to Edward IV. At least two other scribes, designated as the Roman Numerals Scribe and the Margaret of Burgundy Scribe, have also left their mark on the manuscript.

The current version of the digital edition includes a transcription and a translation mapped to a high-quality image of the manuscript as well as editorial notes. The version is stage 1.5 of four projected releases. Subsequent stages will introduce a database of the individuals named on the roll, text-search capacities, a digitally layered image revealing the work of each scribe, and an expanded set of notes and commentary. In line with the student-oriented organization of the project itself, the edition evidently has student users in mind. The English translation makes the text available to readers without Latin fluency; in the Latin transcription, some spellings have been modified to fit the norms of modern scholarship, and punctuation has been added for ease of reading. The line breaks in the transcription match those of the manuscript, making it easy for a beginning paleographer to move between the edition and the original text. Details of the manuscript description are presented in clear, nontechnical language. These features offer unobtrusive support for inexperienced readers.

In the edition’s present form, a digital image of the manuscript appears at the left of the screen, while a textbox at the right contains the edition. Buttons at the top of the textbox allow the user to select which combination of Latin, English, editorial notes, and comparisons to Wall’s 1919 edition they would like to view. The user navigates by clicking a roundel or section of text on the manuscript image, which brings up the corresponding section in the textbox on the right. Each section is numbered for ease of referencing. Although this form of navigation makes continuous reading difficult, it also forces the reader’s attention back to the complex layout of the original genealogical diagram.

The digital edition is a clear improvement over Wall’s text. In part, this is because the digital format allows the reader to experience the manuscript as a continuous scroll, with its diagrams positioned and colored as intended by the scribe. A number of errors in transcription and misunderstandings of the Latin have been corrected, and the digital edition includes certain passages omitted by Wall. In...