III. Codification and digital edition
IV. Guide to marked elements and their display
I. 1. Number and date
All the documents receive a chronological numbering, that is, a letter dated February 14, 1568 receives the number 1568 02 14, whose first two figures correspond to the year, the following two to the month and the last two to the day. This number will also be the identifier of the letter within our database. When the exact month or day of the letter is not known, the double zero is used: thus, 1578 07 [00] means that the letter was written on an indeterminate day in July 1578. The square brackets indicate that the date is conjectural from the editor: [1570 00 00-70 11 09] means, therefore, that the conjectured date ranges from an indeterminate day and month in 1570 to November 9 of that same year. The great advantage of matching numbering and date is that any letter can be included in this work or change the provisional date of those that already exist without having to modify the numbering of the rest of the documents and the references to the other letters throughout this epistolary.
Both previously published and unpublished letters will follow a critical dating method. Because a large number of documents are minutes or drafts written and filed by the senders, in many cases it has been necessary to guess their date.
I. 2. Name of the correspondents and place of stay
The same critical method is applied to the senders and recipients of the letters and to the places where they were at the time of writing. In letters where the addressee's name does not appear explicitly, the hypotheses are also presented in square brackets. Regarding the places of stay, it is necessary to tread very finely in the case of BAM due to his continuous displacements both outside and within Spain: his correspondence and the dates of the prologues to his works are continuous points of reference; also here the parentheses indicate confirmed data and the square brackets, conjectured data.
I. 3. Transmission
We have used the following abbreviations both in the conspectus siglorum and in the subsequent preparation of the critical apparatus:
B) Draft or minutes (usually autographs).
(C) Copy.
(Cap) Chapters (handwritten record of the main contents of a letter).
(E) Edition.
(F) Fragment.
O) Original (letter copied to clean and autograph, or provided with autograph signature).
(R) Summary
(T) Translation.
When indicating the handwritten witnesses, we cite the pagination or foliation of the files as it is currently established. Page and folio breaks are indicated in the margin of the text, with links to facsimiles of the documents themselves. As a general rule, we will respect the paragraph division of the originals.
I. 4. Author/s of the critical edition, translation (if applicable) and notes
This section indicates the name of the researcher or researchers of the team who have been in charge of each of the stages of editing the text of the letter.
I. 5. Author/a of the codification and digital edition
This section indicates the name of the researcher or researchers of the team who have been in charge of tagging the texts and presenting them on the project website.
I. 6. Summary
To facilitate quick access to the content of the letters, a summary of them is included. In these summaries an attempt is made to collect each and every one of the main chapters of each letter. In the summary we try to also include the people and works cited in the letter, so that from now on the reader has double access to this metadata: that is, through the indexes and the abstracts.
I.7. Comment
Each document is preceded by a brief comment, which basically responds to the following points:
– Contextualization of the letter with information on the circumstances that surrounded or conditioned its writing within the global framework of the epistolary.
– Observations, when appropriate, on the date of the letter (dating problems, correction of previous dating, etc.), the place of stay of the sender and recipient.
– Comment, when appropriate, on the way in which the different witnesses have been handled for publication. Different drafts, different copies, letters only partially transcribed in previous editions, letters preserved only in printed editions, etc.
– Observations on material issues related to the type of witness: clean copy autograph or not (original), drafts, office copies, etc. In the case of the originals, an attempt is made to collect information about the stamp (reason, measured shape, etc.), remains of sealing wax and the strip of paper on which the stamp was printed and which served to close the letter.
The Latin text is transcribed maintaining as a general rule the graphic uses of the scholars involved in the epistolary:
– The different variations of «ae» («ę», «e» y «æ») are always transcribed as «ae» for ease of reading; the diphthong «ae», on the other hand, was always pronounced as a monophthong, so the conservation of one spelling or another is irrelevant.
– For «j» we write, as a rule, «i»; we also regularize the spelling «u» and its corresponding capital letter «V» both for vowel and semi-consonantal use: that is, «u» always in lower case (for vowel and semi-consonantal use); «V» always in capital letter (for vowel and semi-consonantal use).
– The abbreviations are systematically expanded, indicating visually which part corresponds to the consigned text and which part has been reconstructed (see below for their annotation).
– The Greek, Hebrew and Arabic words are transcribed as they are noted in the originals, as they demonstrate the degree of knowledge of these languages that the correspondents possess.
– The marks that frequently appear over adverbs and prepositions, as well as the umlaut signs, are deleted.
– The punctuation has been modernized in accordance with current philological requirements, to free the letters from the commas that, following the Renaissance norm, appear before conjunctions («et», «nec», «aut», «si», «ac» , «seu», «cum», etc.).
– The exclamation and question marks are added when required by the tone of the sentence and the presence of interjections.
As a general rule, all the erasures are transcribed in the text of the letters, as well as the words that should have been deleted, since these hesitations provide relevant information about the writing process. We also indicate to the reader which words have been inserted in the margin of the text or between the lines. Misspellings, which appear from time to time, are noted in their original and corrected version (see below for their display). All the interventions of the editor in the writing box will be formulated between rectangular brackets and in italics: like this, for example, [Sobrescrito:].
Many of the general rules adopted for Latin texts are applicable to the transcription of texts in Spanish:
– These texts are accentuated according to our philological criteria.
– The double or geminate consonants at the beginning of the word are simplified, as well as the multiple vibrating consonant after the nasal.
– The «b» and the «v», whose use is indistinct, remain as they appear written; the «u» and «v» are transcribed according to their phonetic value.
– The most common contractions «del», «della», «dello», «desta», «ques», «questa» etc. are preserved according to their original spelling without an apostrophe.
– Regarding upper and lower case letters, the current spelling rules are observed (cf. RAE: http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp).
For other letters in vernacular languages, as a general rule, the spellings are reproduced as presented in the document. In the case of French, the capital letters and accentuation will be left as is to respect the orthography and morphology of Plantinian French.
An important part of the letters, especially those written in Spanish, have previously seen the light in editions of the 19th and 19th centuries where the text was transcribed without philological intention and with regularizations and modifications without following a unitary criterion. In order not to overload the critical apparatus of the letters, we have not noted variants without significant relevance that affect the spelling or the development of the abbreviations.
III. Codification and digital edition
In this project, the advanced method of text coding according to the TEI standard is used, since it allows enriching the texts with different levels of information about content and structure in a human-readable format, incorporates the characteristics of a database and allows data migration to and from other information systems due to the growing popularity of XML as an interchange format. Finally the XML-TEI markup language allows for easy transfer to digital publishing, as demonstrated on this website.
In the edition of the Latin letters we have opted for a digital presentation that includes, in addition to the facsimiles and the XML document itself, three columns that contain, from left to right: the text with the critical apparatus and visualization of the XML-TEI markup; Spanish translation and notes; and (plain) text without display of XML-TEI markup. In the digital edition of the vernacular texts, we also present the facsimiles and the XML document together with two columns: the first for the text and critical apparatus (with visualization of the XML-TEI markup); and the second for the text and notes (without displaying the XML-TEI markup).
The RelaxNG scheme governing letter markup is a customization that includes selected elements from the core, header, textstructure, figures, analysis, textcritic, namesdates, linking, msdescription, transcr, and corpus modules. Regarding the information contained in the header of the XML documents, together with the traditional and mandatory elements, we must mention here other elements that are essential among the metadata of this digital edition. Some of the most important ones are in the profileDesc: especially the correspDesc element, which nests the correspAction (needed to mark who the sender and recipient are, as well as the place of sending and the place of reception); also within the profileDesc we have included the elements of the language used in the letter, and material writer of the letter. As to the names of people, in the header we include some notes about all the people involved and mentioned in the letter by means of the listPerson, person and note elements. Other elements of interest within the teiHeader are the notesStmt, with which we tag the incipit of the letter and a brief summary in English of it; Inside the we have included the element to describe the primary source in detail. Finally, the header ends with a revivionDesc element to collect the change history. The various witnesess in the document are contained, with an @xml:id identifier, in a sourceDesc element.
Tras el <teiheader> y antes del <text> viene el elemento <facsimile>, con las fotos correspondientes a la carta. El <text> comienza por un elemento <front> que recoge un comentario preliminar sobre la carta sobre el contexto en que fue escrita. En cuanto a la estructura textual de la carta propiamente dicha, dentro del elemento <body> incluimos dos divisiones principales: una para el sobrescrito o dirección de la carta, normalmente escrita en folio aparte, y otra para el texto de la carta propiamente dicha. Dentro del texto de la carta marcamos los dos elementos más característicos del género epistolar (la salutatio o saludo y la ualedictio o despedida), con los elementos <opener> y <closer>, cada uno de ellos con otra serie de elementos típicamente epistolares como <salute> o <dateline>. El elemento <back> ha quedado reservado principalmente para las notas. En el caso de las cartas latinas, cada documento XML contiene dos elementos <text> anidados dentro de un elemento <group>: el primer <text> para la fuente y el segundo para la traducción.
Regarding the tagged semantic elements, in addition to the names of people, places, titles of works and dates, it is essential in the corpus of the project to tag the variants of the critical apparatus (elements app, lem and rdg). As regards semantic and formal issues, phenomena such as abbreviations ( expan/ ex), strikethrough text (del), added texts and where (add), substitutions of a text struck out by another addition (subst), text that should have been deleted (surplus), reconstructed text (supplied), and corrections (by means of sic and corr elements inserted in an element choice.
As to the transformation and visualization of the XML-TEI documents, in this edition we have resorted to an XSLT sheet of the TEI family, specifically the one that corresponds to the profile called JSI. Las ventajas de esta hoja de transformación consisten en que no solo permite distinguir visualmente con claridad cada uno de los fenómenos semánticos y estructurales etiquetados, sino que incluso genera un globo, al colocar el ratón sobre la palabra, donde se indica el elemento TEI que se visualiza (compruébese en los ejemplos de la guía que viene debajo). En la página que sigue relacionamos los principales elementos marcados en las cartas y su salida de visualización a través de la hoja de estilo JSI:
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