METS, the Middle English Texts Series

I checked out the Alliterative Morte Arthure ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metseditions.org&#x2F;read&#x2F;KWj7bbRIl0RBUmG9uG60zTv8Wak97Zl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metseditions.org&#x2F;read&#x2F;KWj7bbRIl0RBUmG9uG60zTv8Wak97Z...</a> ).<p>I&#x27;m charmed by the Middle English footnoting style of providing glosses for words that may trouble the modern-English-speaking reader without bothering to note which words those glosses are for.<p>However, this edition isn&#x27;t typeset correctly, and the glosses are appearing attached to the wrong lines. (At least, I&#x27;m assuming that &quot;great&quot;, glossing an empty line, is meant to gloss &quot;grete&quot; on the following line, and &quot;shameful deeds&quot;, on the line &quot;And the precious prayer &#x2F; of his pris Moder&quot; is actually meant to gloss the following line &quot;Sheld us fro shamesdeede &#x2F; and sinful workes&quot;.)†<p>This is a pretty serious problem.<p>More generally, these appear to be edited critical editions, and I wish academic texts would actually display the text of the work they represent. I don&#x27;t mind displaying a standardized &quot;editor&#x27;s rendering&quot;, but show the actual text too. I want to know what the scribe wrote. This is an electronic reference. We can afford the space.<p>† Tangentially, it&#x27;s also interesting that &quot;sinful&quot; counts as alliterating with &quot;shield&quot; and &quot;shame&quot;.<p>--- edit ---<p>Heh. I looked into the display. There are two different documents, text and glosses, and they&#x27;re supposed to be synched up by matching &lt;br&gt; tags.<p>This could actually work, because the panel for the text has a hardcoded width of 487 px regardless of window size. But they&#x27;ve blown it by including a sentence at the beginning of the text that is more than one line long - even though they know exactly how long a line is - and ignoring that in their emission of &lt;br&gt; tags. So every line of text is pushed down by one line, and the same isn&#x27;t true of the glosses.<p>The correct way to do this is to have the glosses in the same document as the text:<p><pre><code> And the precious prayer of his pris&lt;div class=&quot;gloss&quot;&gt;excellent&lt;&#x2F;div&gt; Moder </code></pre> and then style the glosses to float to the right.<p>Or if you need separate documents, you could have a table and put glosses in the same row as the line they&#x27;re glossing. The text is already displayed in a table - but there&#x27;s just one row, with one cell for line numbers, one for the text, and one for the glosses.

&gt; many noble clerkes have endevoyred them to wryte and compyle many notable werkes and historyes to the ende that it myght come to the knowlege and under­stondyng of suche as ben ygnoraunt, of which the nombre is infenyte.<p>From <i>The Game and Playe of the Chesse</i>, which I misread as cheese and clicked on out of bafflement. It’s a book of moral lessons to be drawn from the chessmen.

One of the fascinating things about middle English for modern readers is that spelling was somewhat arbitrary. I suppose the literacy rate so low back then that the community of people blessed with the skill of reading and writing got to make up their own rules.

I received a METS edition of the Prose Merlin as a kid. Lots of fun reading that book. Indeed the arbitrary and self-inconsistent spelling was initially a turn off, but now I see it as more of a fuzzy orthography.<p>I like alternating between reading in a made up Middle English accent and reading as if it were modern English, which works because its prose not poetry where the rhyming and metre be all off.