Old Books, New Tricks: Introducing My Digital Edition with the SLab

On my very first day at UVA, I met Rennie Mapp at a bus stop. I asked this random woman for directions, we shared the short ride to Central Grounds, and she asked me about what my plans were here in Charlottesville. I was absolutely beaming with energy for all the plans I didn’t yet have, and after listening to my ecstatic ramblings, Rennie gave me an enthusiastic pitch about all the exciting opportunities available for digital humanities research at the university. She gave me her card, and I had to know more. I wasn’t a medievalist then, I didn’t have an advisor yet, I didn’t even really know where to find New Cabell, but first thing, I knew I ought to look into this DH business.¹ Since then, I’ve been dipping my toes into all things DH at UVA. I have spent the past several years exploring DH methods through workshops, coursework, conferences, and collaborative projects — building a prototype of a digital edition (something I’ll touch on in another blog post) and working on XML-encoding projects like Lives of the Saints: The Medieval French Hagiography Project with the mentorship of my advisor Amy Ogden. My dissertation project is the culmination of all these experiences and a chance to push the boundaries of what a digital edition can offer.

So, salut, SLab enthusiasts! My name’s Loren Lee (from Tennessee) and I’m thrilled to continue integrating DH methods into my research and to contribute to the Scholars’ Lab as this year’s Digital Humanities Fellow. I’m in the last year of my PhD in the French Department, where I specialize in medieval literature, manuscript studies, and Old French translation. For years now, I’ve benefited from the relentless encouragement of my mentors in the French Department, and now, I have fuller access to the rich guidance available through the Scholars’ Lab community. The DH Fellowship gives me the opportunity to dedicate this year to completing my dissertation — a digital edition of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman verse redaction of La Vie de sainte Marie l’Égyptienne known as Version T.

Version T, which has never before been published translated into a modern language, offers a compelling narrative of bodily and spiritual transformation as the penitent saint Mary chooses to abandon her former life as a prolific sex worker in favor of ascetic, solitary existence in the desert. For decades, she lives peacefully, grazing on grasses and drinking directly from streams, modeling for readers profound humility. But Version T complicates the basic narrative of good-girl-gone-bad-gone-good-again, suggesting that the act of offering one’s body for the comfort of others is not just redeemable, it is downright Christ-like. Despite the rich manuscript tradition surrounding this text, it has been somewhat neglected in scholarship, which is another one of the reasons why I’m so eager to work on it. Although saints’ Lives as a genre was hugely popular in the middle ages, modern scholarship on the literature of the period has been largely fixated on more ‘secular’ texts like romances. By examining challenging texts like La vie de sainte Marie l’Égyptienne, we can gain a greater appreciation of medieval popular culture and we can build a more nuanced understanding of female representation in the middle ages.

My dissertation will offer new insights into this puzzling text while also experimenting with innovative digital editorial methods. Readers of my edition will be able to more intuitively visualize common medieval manuscript features like textual variations among the extant copies, excised elements like cut out miniatures and ripped folios, and scribal errors and abbreviations. All of these common aspects of medieval manuscripts are typically lost as they are tidied up in print editions, but they are integral to the manuscript reading experience. Flexibility is something that digital editions can offer in a way print cannot, and I’m eager to explore how dynamic publishing systems like Quarto can shape the way a modern audience reads a medieval text. My project seeks to make a commentary on the profound digital turn in manuscript studies, which has forever changed how we access and interact with premodern sources and how we conceptualize preservation and accessibility.

This year at the Scholars’ Lab, I’ll be working on transforming my XML-encoded manuscript data into a functional, interactive digital edition. While I’ve laid much of the groundwork already — completing XML encoding for the eight manuscript copies I’m working with and making progress on key translations (more on this in another blog post) — I still have a lot of work ahead. My hope is to create an edition that not only presents the text but also fosters a deeper understanding of the editorial choices that go into creating such a work.

The Scholars’ Lab is the perfect place for this next phase of my research. With mentorship from the SLab’s experts like Jeremy Boggs and the chance to collaborate with my fellow DH scholars in Praxis, I am confident that I’ll be able to produce something truly innovative. I’m also looking forward to engaging with the wider digital medievalist community, learning from their insights, and hopefully establishing for myself a foothold in the field as both an early career medievalist and DH scholar.

Throughout the year, my blog posts will share updates about my own progress, challenges, and discoveries, and I’ll point interested readers in the direction of other cool developments in the intersection between digital humanities and medieval manuscript studies.² I’m eager to see how the year unfolds with the support of the Scholars’ Lab team and how we can do some new tricks with some very old books.