Outcomes of Editorial Intervention in Texts from National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS ii.1: Past, Present and Futur

Abstract

In editing medieval manuscripts changes in tastes, needs, conventions and resources have resulted in edited texts so disparate that it is difficult to visualise the relative uniformity exhibited by a codex copyist. In this article I compare different editions of texts copied by one of the scribes of National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS ii.1, responsible for twenty-one entries in the manuscript. Each edition has been collated with the manuscript to establish the criteria adopted by each editor in their transcriptions. I focus on how editors address aspects such as expansion of abbreviations, normalisation and treatment of certain palaeographical peculiarities. The goal is to show how the work of the same scribe has been variously interpreted and how this variation disguises the essence of this copyist’s written language.