The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell: towards a digital edition

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of the preparatory work necessary for the eventual production of a digital edition of the romance <The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell>, presenting all the data collected.

The first part tries to offer most of the literary criticism published about the romance. The text belongs to the Loathly Lady tradition, while preserving at the same time a distinctive character. The figure of Dame Ragnell will be analyzed in its various interpretations, together with the potential humorous intent of the author and those connections with earlier and contemporary narratives that make it so interesting.

In the second part, after a brief introduction to the digital technologies applied to critical editing and to XML language, we will discuss why a new digital edition can benefit from a paleographic and textual encoding at its core and how XML language can express implicit and physical features impossible to record through the printed medium.