One thing that really excited me is that the website will be able to replicate some aspects of a medieval reader’s encounter with manuscript books far more closely than a printed edition can. Medieval authors frequently cite the bible and secular texts from classical antiquity. They rarely give any precise details about what they are citing – a reference to Job 11:21 would be described as ‘In Iob’, while a reference to Augustine’s City of God  could simply be attributed to ‘Augustinus’ (and sometimes to someone else entirely). But medieval authors would have expected their readers to know the source; largely because they took it for granted that their readers had undergone the same education in the classics they had, and would be daily involved in the study of the bible, the lectio divina.

Few modern readers have the same intense familiarity with these texts, knowledge which medieval authors took for granted. Printed editions have to rely on the rather heavy-handed method of revealling the identity of an author’s sources in an apparatus fontium at the bottom of each and every page. However, readers of the e-edition of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie will be able to hover the cursor over the italicised text of a quotation to reveal a box which divulges the source of that quotation. I think this imitates rather nicely the way a medieval reader would have scanned his mind to recall where he had heard those words before.

This is just one small way in which electronic editions can harness the possibilities of xml coding to present texts in new and innovative ways which replicate medieval modes of reading.