Editorial Principles

The new digital media affords us the ability to make accessible every level of the editorial process (from manuscript facsimile, to diplomatic transcriptions, to normalized and critical transcriptions) and to provide seamless connections between these data sources at granular levels. For this reason the present edition aims to offer a normalized critical edition that prioritizes creating a clean and readable text for the reader. As such we have chosen to regularize late medieval orthography.

Throughout the edition we have expanded "e" to "ae/oe", regularized late-medieval spelling (e.g. changing "sicud" to "sicut") and introduced modern paragraph breaks and modern punctuation in place of late of medieval punctuation.

The choice to privilege a normalized critical text is supported by the fact that, given the possibilities of new media, we are no longer forced to choose between providing a modern normalized text and a diplomatic edition that records the variances and complications of late medieval writing practices. This edition has been prepared in conjunction with the coordinating efforts of the Scholastic Commentaries and Text Archive, such that every section, paragraph, and quotation can be linked to a diplomatic transcription or multiple diplomatic transcriptions, and further linked to digital facsimiles of the manuscripts themselves. These diplomatic transcriptions are where medieval spelling and punctuation can be recorded at various levels of detail according to the discretion of the editor. For this reason, we offer here a normalized edition that can and will function as an access point to subsequent diplomatic transcriptions made available to those with an interest in this kind of textual detail.

Given that there is only one extant manuscript of Gracilis's commentary, the critical apparatus aims primarily to record editorial emendations against the text present in the manuscript as well as to identify significant scribal corrections.