Partonopeus de Blois: an Electronic Resource

Project start date: 2001-09

Project end date: 2005-05

"Partonopeus de Blois" was one of the most popular romances composed in the 12th century, and played a key role in the development of Old French narrative literature. Analysis of the text is complicated by the fact that it exists in a number of different versions, which are difficult to study using a conventional printed edition. This project has produced an electronic resource that allows researchers to read and compare all the different versions in detail, without having to work from the original manuscripts (held in libraries from Yale to the Vatican) or microfilms. Flexible access to the full text of all the manuscripts makes it much easier for scholars to explore how and why the different versions of the poem came to be produced. This will help us to understand more clearly the ways in which medieval French texts were “edited”, adapted and rewritten to suit different audiences and changing circumstances. Our on-line edition also provides searching software that will enable scholars to carry out much more sophisticated investigations of "Partonopeus" than has been feasible hitherto, opening up the possibility of new insights into its literary technique and linguistic features as well as the development of its manuscript tradition. Generation of HTML files from XML data for web-delivery. Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination