The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive: 4. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 581 (SC 987) on CD-ROM (Institutional Use)

This CD-ROM, with full color digital facsimiles and documentary texts of San Marino, Huntington Library MS HM 128 [Hm, Hm2 ], is the sixth volume of The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, an international collaborative project devoted to electronic publication of all the medieval and renaissance witnesses to William Langland's Piers Plowman. Hm is a second-generation witness to the B version with extensive erasures [over 1500 instances] and heavily emended with over 700 additions to the original text in contemporary hands. Hyper-textual linkages enable display of the complex relationships of the base text to other B witnesses as well as delineating the individual contributions of the three scribes who wrote and changed this manuscripts. The color facsimile images of every page in the manuscript are JPEG reductions of high resolution TIFF files. Every image is hyper-textually linked to the edited text which is itself presented in four different views: a diplomatic type-facsimile; a scribal text which includes iconic indications of scribal error; a critical text with lapsus calami corrected; and an AllTags view that shows all of the editorial interventions on one screen. The edition is offered with two different browsers, each with slightly different features. The Elwood viewer enables complex boolean and simple text searches and displays text and facsimile on facing pages. Minimum system requirements: PCs: 486 or later; Windows95, 98, Me, NT, XP +. Preferably a Pentium with a clock speed of 500 megahertz or more and 32 Mb of Ram are required to run the basic Internet Explorer browser: Internet Explorer, Version 6.0 + [this may be downloaded free from the Internet for users still running earlier iterations.] The more sophisticated Elwood browser requires a minimal screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels Macintosh users require high-end equipment [System 9 or later] running Windows emulation software. 384 Mb of Ram are required for System 9 and 512 Mb RAM for System 10.