Editor’s Note
Authored by Savannah Caldwell and Kristina Going
The Hargrett Hours contains both Latin and French. We have created two types of editions: one that is diplomatic, which represents the texts as they appear in the Hargrett Hours as faithfully as possible, and one that normalizes the orthography. The principles that we followed for the diplomatic transcription, for which we consulted Michelle P. Brown’s A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 and Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham’s Introduction to Manuscript Studies, included keeping the original orthography, preserving capitalization and punctuation (or lack thereof) as found in the manuscript, expanding abbreviations in parentheses, and using vertical bars to represent line breaks in the text. The diplomatic transcriptions can be found in a PDF document on the website under “Commentary.” For the normalized edition, we replaced u’s and i’s where modernized Latin spelling has v’s or j’s and did not include vertical bars to denote line breaks; however, we preserved the punctuation (except for the addition of accent marks to the French transcription) and capitalization as found in the text and included expansions of abbreviations in parentheticals. Although Middle French accentuation and punctuation does not align exactly with modern practices, accent marks were added to the French prayer and rubrics in order to add clarity and aid comprehension for modern speakers.
The 2018 class worked with the 2016 class’s initial transcription, which we checked for accuracy before creating a finalized edition. The 2018 class then compared the Latin to the Vulgate’s Latin on Bible Study Tools and Bible Gateway (www.biblestudytools.com/vul/ and www.biblegateway.com/) and the French to the online Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (DMF 2015) (www.atilf.fr/dmf/) in developing the established edition, which now appears on the website. The 2018 class verified that the Passion sequence, according to the Gospel of John, closely follows the Latin Vulgate. Neither of the first two classes was able to find the Middle French prayer in any other manuscript, so troublesome words could not be compared to another version. The 2018 class was able, however, to make more progress in transcribing the French text, and the few words that remain uncertain are footnoted.
