St Patrick's epistles - Transcriptions of the seven medieval manuscript witnesses

St Patrick of Ireland was a historical personage and a writer of letters two which survive today, Confessio and Epistola ad milites Corotici. These two texts are important historical sources for Patrick’s life and Christianity in fifth-century Britain and Ireland. The Royal Irish Academy’s Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack project makes a variety of resources related to the historical Patrick and both of his epistles freely available for research, including facsimile images of the manuscripts and text-critical editions. However, the project did not publish transcriptions of each manuscript witness.

This edition tries to fill this gap by providing electronic transcriptions of all seven medieval manuscript witnesses of Confessio and Epistola. The electronic transcriptions are encoded with the TEI P5 standard using a document-centred editing approach focusing on scribe-related and text structural features. The edition presents different views on the transcription data and possibilities for cross-comparison of readings. It is hoped that this new kind of edition will augment already existing editorial work and facilitate the analysis of the medieval documents.