This CD-ROM, with full color digital facsimiles and documentary texts of London, British Library Additional Manuscript 35287 [M], is the fifth 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. Recognized as one of the central witnesses to the B text, M has the peculiar interest of a very extensive range of contemporary corrections and a mass of nearly contemporary and later annotations. These can only be represented by the combined hypertextual view of the text linked to color digital images.
The color facsimile images of every page in the manuscript are JPEG reductions of high resolution TIFF files. Every image is hypertextually 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.