Editing (and publishing) medieval vernacular inscriptions in a digital environment: potential and limitations

I should like to discuss briefly the advantages of an integrated system of publication – digital and traditional – in relation to the critical editing and linguistic analysis of medieval texts, with particular reference to texts of a non-literary nature, composed in the numerous Romance varieties in use in Italy in the late Middle Ages. The digital publication constitutes a ground-breaking innovation in the methods of textual and linguistic analysis, and ultimately for the historical interpretation of our linguistic past. This is linked both to the potential for interrogation of marked up texts, and the invaluable information about the ‘grammar of writing’ and the spoken languages underlying written records it yields, and to the fact that important datasets, acquired independently by different teams of scholars, across time and space, are expanding very significantly the corpora of texts available to scholars and open to digital interrogation. Therefore we can engage in analysis and cross-referencing of textual and linguistic (sometimes even material) features of medieval Romance texts in the numerous languages in which they were composed and gauge our findings in a much wider context than traditional philological methods would allow– a fact that does not only make more data available and brought to scholarly attention, but actually has the potential to influence our perception of history very significantly. A change in the means of documenting the past cannot but result in an important reassessing of its significance and of our abilities to interpret it.