Outcomes of Editorial Intervention in Texts from National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS ii.1: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

In editing medieval manuscripts changes in tastes, needs, conventions and resources have
resulted in edited texts so disparate that it is difficult to visualise the relative uniformity
exhibited by a codex copyist. In this article I compare different editions of texts copied by one
of the scribes of National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS ii.1, responsible for twenty-one
entries in the manuscript. Each edition has been collated with the manuscript to establish the
criteria adopted by each editor in their transcriptions. I focus on how editors address aspects
such as expansion of abbreviations, normalisation and treatment of certain palaeographical
peculiarities. The goal is to show how the work of the same scribe has been variously
interpreted and how this variation disguises the essence of this copyist’s written language.