All posts by Cai Henderson

Project Update: Glossary and Sources Work

Project Update: Since January, the Liber Uricrisiarum team has compiled a long list of potential glossary entries, with draft definitions. Based on that work, we’ve added language notes for a few more difficult or unusual words and corrected a number of readings in the edition, which is now receiving one more full proof-reading against the base manuscripts. We’ve also written most of the introduction and discovered new and interesting textual relationships among the witnesses to the Liber Uricrisiarum and several of its fifteenth- and sixteenth-century descendants.
We are currently working on generating a finished glossary, condensing the expanded Explanatory Notes, and finishing the introduction, in order to send a completed text to a potential publisher early in 2018.
Looking ahead, we have compiled two very preliminary lists of headwords (nearly 2000 herbs, fruits, trees, minerals, and miscellaneous medical terms) and cited authorities (over 50) in Daniel’s Herbal.

Project Update: First Draft of Explanatory Notes Complete

This January we completed the first, expansive draft of explanatory notes for the edition of the Liber Uricrisiarum, covering source materials, language notes on difficult vocabulary and syntax, and occasional indications of important differences between the major textual families. We have a few source notes left to complete, and we’re now working on streamlining the notes we’ve written. Starting this month, we’ll create the first draft of the glossary, while we also continue work on the front matter for the volume.

Project Update: Second Draft of Edition Complete

This October, we wrapped up the second draft of the complete Liber Uricrisiarum, finishing the textual apparatus and re-proofing the text proper from the first full draft, which we finished in the summer. Because of the length of the text, the large number of witnesses, and the complexities of the textual tradition, the apparatus is highly selective, focused on errors only. Most of those errors are manifest at first reading, while some become clear upon comparison of variants. The final edition will require at least one more complete pass through the text and apparatus, primarily in a copy-editing mode to catch any remaining inconsistencies or errors in transcription.