Preface

NEW PREFACE TO BE WRITTEN I HAVE ATTACHED THE BOILER PLATE THAT GOES WITH MOST EDITIONS, THOUGH THAT TOO NEED EDITING.

During the years we have been working on W, we have incurred many debts. We are particularly indebted to the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. In 1992, IATH, funded by the University, the IBM Corporation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation, began its work of exploring and expanding the potential of information technology as a tool for humanities research. To that end, it has every subsequent year provided a series of faculty Fellows with equipment, extensive consultation, technical support, applications programming, and networked publishing facilities. Cultivating partnerships in humanities computing initiatives with libraries, publishers, information technology companies, scholarly organizations, and others interested in the intersection of computers and cultural heritage, IATH has transformed humanistic computing at the University of Virginia. Without its assistance, much of this edition simply could not have been created.

We have been fortunate to have worked in the company of computer specialists who have understood the special needs of English teachers. First and most profound thanks are offered to Professor John Unsworth of the English Department at the University of Virginia and Director of IATH. His support for the Archive has been both generous and unstinting. He has provided equipment, software, space, and monies for research assistants. Even more, he has given us his personal time and shared with us his vast knowledge of hard and software. On too many occasions to detail, he has saved us from the consequences of our ignorance and folly. Other members of his staff have been unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge, especially Daniel Pitti, Project Director of IATH, who has also worked overtime to solve our problems. Thanks are due also Stephen Ramsay, whose Perl scripts simplified many a complicated task we could not have done on our own, as well as to Robert W. Bingler, David Cosca, and Chris Jessee, all of whom helped us over many technical and conceptual hurdles, some of our own creation, with unfailing competence, courtesy, and charity. Kirk V. Hastings wrote the scripts to convert our SGML files to the XML and HTML files that make our files available to users of Macintosh computers, and we are grateful to Beth Nowviskie for designing the opening page. John Price-Wilkin, created the first Document Type Definition (DTD) for both The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive and SEENET, taught us to appreciate the elegant complexities of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and shepherded us through a myriad of other problems. Peter Baker, in permitting us to use and extend his Old English Junius fonts and to use his Junicode font has made it possible for us to display non-standard characters such as yoghs, punctus elevatuses, raised points, etc. Bjarne Melin of the Finnish firm Citec Software LTD Oy, makers of Multidoc Pro, has been extraordinarily helpful and patient in helping us work out various problems related to display.

We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library who ------------ REVISE THIS PARAGRAPH

We wish to thank the graduate research assistants who have worked in Charlottesville with us on W and another two dozen manuscripts of Piers Plowman. Those competent and energetic young scholars are named on the title page for their part in preparing this text. Their work has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

No one who works with Piers Plowman can fail to be indebted to the labours of Professor George Kane and his collaborators in editing the Athlone Piers Plowman. First, the Athlone texts were produced to an almost impossibly high standard of transcriptional and collational accuracy. In nearly every instance, we have found their apparatus both full and reliable. Simple transcriptional accuracy is by far the hardest, most demanding, as well as one of the most important tasks facing any editor. After several years of checking their apparatus in a variety of contexts, we can say that it is practically perfect.N They have set a high standard. Moreover, they have laid out in their detailed introductions—with an explicitness and transparency unparalleled in editions of Middle English texts—their reasons for hundreds of their editorial decisions. We are accustomed to textual notes for such purposes, notes that call attention to difficult cases and that serve as synecdoches for the full process of editorial reasoning. By publishing these arguments in their introductions, the Athlone editors have austerely placed upon their readers the severe burden of recapitulating at least portions of their editorial project. They have laid out explicitly the evidence they take to be relevant to their editorial decisions, and they invite their readers to challenge their text or their argument of the evidence. More than is usually the case, the Athlone editors have played fair with their readers. We are grateful to them for their achievement and their example.

Katherine Heinrichs

The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

?? 2011