Digitizing the Old English Anonymous and Wulfstanian Homilies through the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English (ECHOE) Project

Abstract

This article first outlines the challenges involved in the editing of Old English anonymous and Wulfstanian homilies before introducing the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Homilies in Old English (ECHOE) project. This new initiative at the University of Göttingen reverses the traditional collation of texts and instead celebrates the book-historical significance of every individual manuscript version, its textual and palaeographical idiosyncrasies, and its revisional layers up through c. 1200 AD. The project provides new forms of display to expose the complex interversional network of textual representations, and develops a range of digital tools to facilitate the identification and swift comparison of related passages. It includes digital facsimiles, palaeographical and rhetorical version profiles, and the Latin sources for each homily, creating opportunities for unprecedented research on the transmission, composition, variation, and performance of the fluid preaching text. Key terms: Old English prose; homilies; sermons; palaeography; digital editing; variance; text encoding; ECHOE