Texts Level: Incipit
Definition: Beginning words of a text, often used to identify it.
Comment:
About the necessity for transcription of incipits: in particular, and if at all possible, transcribe the incipit of an unidentified text or one of uncertain authorship (esp. in the cases when one only has a generic title) because the incipit may lead someone to the text. Don't bother to give incipits of complete bibles, liturgical and statute books because they all begin the same way (essentially), and the signifying texts, if any, are often buried quite deeply. In the case of fragments, you decide if you want to transcribe incipit (and explicit) or not; it might be a somewhat superfluous exercise because these pieces of text are presumably quite visible to the reader in the image(s), but the it's true that the transcription might be helpful to students. If you do choose to transcribe incipits of fragments, preface the transcription with a double slash. The reason for this is that at some point DS may provide incipit lists for browsing, and it will be just as well to be able to programmatically separate the "real" incipits from those produced by the chance of survival (and which are necessarily internal to their no-longer-extant complete texts). Consider using the Notes field if you feel the need to include multiple sets of incipits, such as those for prologues, dedicatory letters, arguments, prefaces, and so forth.
About the length of transcription of an incipit: transcribe preferably far enough into the text to include a finite verb; always transcribe past biblical quotes; always transcribe at least the first two verses of poetry (and signal the break between the two with a diagonal slash mark); never break internally to a syntactical unit.
About the spelling of a transcription: contrary to the inputting of titles (= an abstraction), never normalize to classical Latin (or modern English or whatever) the spelling of the transcription of an incipit (= a specific instance).
About the formatting of a transcription: use the barest minimum of punctuation (in particular, avoid the slash used by printed-book scholars to show a line break since it has meaning only for a tiny minority of medieval manuscripts). For diacritical marks, use the Character Map available on all four "new" forms and on all four "edit" forms. For formatting conventions, see Appendix 4 below. Use "[sic]" only under the direst of necessities, when you yourself, at a later proofreading, run the risk of considering something in the transcription a typographical error.
But above all else, do not use any form of typographical indication of expansion of abbreviations. We repeat: expand abbreviations silently. There are several reasons for this:
- the goal of DS is to lead scholars to manuscripts, and an incipit that is jumbled up with brackets and italics and quote marks (etc.) risks not being pulled from the database in a search on the normal words of an incipit
- when the scholar arrives at the manuscript with its images, he can see for himself what the abbreviations are
- when and if DS produces browseable incipit lists, these extraneous marks will need to be removed anyway
A catalogue, a finding device such as DS is, is not an edition. Let's bear in mind the differing functions of the two.
Example:
- Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum . . . [not a rubric even though all these words may be inscribed in a highly elaborate, decorative script, because there is no statement, however minimal, regarding author or title or textual division, and because these words actually open the text that then follows]
- Cum studia secularium magno desiderio fervere cognoscerem
- Parce michi domine nichil enim sunt dies mei, Exprimitur autem in his verbis humane condicionis instabilitas [note "michi," "nichil," "humane" and "condicionis"]
- Blessid god souereyn goodnesse/ mercy to me thy synfull creature [note verse, not line, division]
- Oportet illum qui wlt esse longevus [and then in the Notes field: The prologue begins, In hoc tractatu de regimine sanitatis aliquid dicendum est]
Properties: Data type: Memo (changed 2009-05-04 for vers. 9.0.2; previously: Data type: text. Field size: 255 characters).
Required?: No, as far as the database is concerned, but in fact one of the four necessary fields for text identification (author/title/generic title/incipit).
