Encoding Codicological and Bibliographical Data in The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive

Though the Text Encoding Initiative has supplied a rich and relatively full system of textual markup for scholarly editors, the present guidelines fall well short of the standards already established in printed bibliograpical studies for both manuscripts and early printed books. I hope that by the Bergen conference a formal committee will have been established and begun work on establishing a standard set of tags of comparable sophistication to those already established for printed editions. However, the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive and other large medieval and Renaissance textual projects will be publishing in 1996 substantial segments of their texts, and some transitional tagging will be necessary as a stop-gap measure. My paper will consist both of a call for colloborative effort to supplement the TEI P3 Guidelines and to propose a set of tags appropriate to representing late medieval Latin and vernacular manuscripts.