The life of Angela da Foligno – edition by Ella Kilgallon
The life of Angela da Foligno (BL. Add. 22754)
Edition by Ella Kilgallon <e.f.kilgallon@qmul.ac.uk>
About the edition: The manuscript, British Library, Additional 22754, contains the life of a popular thirteenth century Italian Franciscan tertiary, Angela of Foligno. Her life survives in over thirty medieval manuscripts across Europe in varying languages, from Latin to Italian and Catalan. This version is a vernacular Italian copy, likely written in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century in central Italy. The manuscript, as it survives, contains solely the life of Angela in an incomplete form. The manuscript is paper with the text written in double columns. There is limited use of colour with a substantial number of capitals missing.
Aim of the digital edition: The aim of this project was to attempt to identify which family of manuscripts the BL Add. 22754 derived from. Having provisionally identified an existing cluster of two Italian vernacular manuscripts, the Perugia, Biblioteca Augusta 1176 and the Perugia, Biblioteca Augusta 1200 I wanted to use the edition to compare the two established texts with this newly discovered manuscript. My aim was to create a digital edition that would allow for a comparison of all three texts in parallel, with the option to toggle between them. A simple highlighting tool would quickly and easily show the user areas of textual similarity and difference. The overall aim was for a prototype that would be easy for the user and offer a way to compare and contrast textual sources.
Nota: My transcriptions have been faithful to the original spelling as seen in the manuscripts and have included both the abbreviations and the expansions, which the user can alternate between. The decision to simply transcribe rather than edit was based on an interest in the vernacular differences and potential mistakes made by the manuscript copyists.