What is an edition in the digital age? Apocrypha - a tool for the study of Old Polish apocrypha

Dorota Rojszczak-Robińska, Adam Mickiewicz University, Faculty od Polish and Classical Philology, Poznań, Poland

In the paper, I will focus on the digital editions on the example of the project „Old Polish New Testament apocrypha” (website: apocrypha.amu.edu.pl).

Apocrypha is a tool for the study of medieval Polish biblical-apocryphal narratives. It is a group of texts (altogether over 2000 manuscript pages and prints) that stand at the centre of Old Polish culture, some of which have not been published to this day. These are the largest surviving Slavic (not only Polish) medieval texts.

This tool is a database with a comprehensive search engine. The tool will be useful to researchers of various disciplines: linguists, literary scholars, medievalists, theologians, cultural studies scholars, historians and source materials experts.

The website offers transliterations and transcriptions of nine apocrypha, newly prepared for the needs of the project according to uniform rules (some of these texts have not been published in full so far).

Thanks to the fact that the Polish texts are accompanied by sources (mainly Latin, including the Bible and the writings of the Fathers of the Church) it is possible to study the reception of these cultural texts in medieval Poland. The grammatical and lexical annotation facilitates linguistic studies (e.g. research into the influence of Latin on emerging Slavic languages). Thanks to the possibility of searching by event and personal threads, it is easy to find and compare the way a given character or event is presented (e.g. Judas or the prayer in the Garden of Olives). The project is fully interdisciplinary.

The aim of the paper is not only to present the project, but also to show the relationship between digital and traditional editions, and to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of both solutions.