A New Critical-Diplomatic Edition of Piers Plowman B in Hypertext

The SEENET (Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts) project now underway to produce on CD-ROM an electronic diplomatic-critical text of PPl will include the following: transcriptions of eight important B-text manuscripts, with annotations describing the manuscripts and reproducing marginal and interlinear additions and corrections; the B archetype (reconstructed through these manuscripts) with annotations; the critical text; concordances of the eight witnesses, of the archetype, and of the critical text; digitized facsimiles of the manuscripts; software to manipulate the texts and annotations; and, if feasible, a version of the critical text normalized to the spellings of C-text MS. X or U (as reflecting the forms closest to those of WL’s natal dialect).