Transcribing “Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience”: Scholarly Editing Covid19-Style

This article describes a methodological experiment conducted during the 13th Annual (Virtual) Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, November 18–20, 2020. The experiment consisted of a “relay style” event in which three teams transcribed, revised, and prepared for submission to this journal a full edition of the “Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience” and other texts from UPenn Ms Codex 660, ff. 86r–95v within the three-day timespan of the conference. The project used methods typical of crowdsourcing and drew participants from all over the world and from all different stages of their careers. After one group completed its work, the results were passed into the hands of the next. The final result—in the form of a finished manuscript edition, ready for submission to Digital Medievalist—was presented on the last day of the conference. The main purpose of this experiment was to demonstrate how the work of the transcriber and editor might be structured as a short-term digital event that relied wholly on virtual interactions with both the source materials and among collaborators. This method also reveals the positive aspects of the many challenges posed by working simultaneously, remotely, and globally.

1 Introduction §1 For some, the year 2020 rivalled the entire fourteenth century in terms of calamity.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought tragedy to countless families and fundamentally changed the way we lived and worked. In academia, many institutions of research and study closed, restricting physical access to most historically significant materials.
Nevertheless, these challenges provided unique opportunities to capitalize on existing digital structures and build new communities of collaboration. Decades of work on the digitization of manuscripts, alongside other technological developments, were vindicated as we turned to the Internet to continue our research and teaching about the Middle Ages. The technological changes wrought by the pandemic also triggered a wider digital emancipation for many, precipitating greater collaboration and sharing of resources in some areas. While participating in an international academic community meant that many of us were already familiar with remote meeting applications such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, these platforms became staples of our everyday interactions at every level. In darker moments, this digital distance produced fatigue, but it also sparked moments of inspiration and communal activity that have exceeded anything we have experienced before. The project we describe here is one such example. §2 Eschewing both the twenty-first and fourteenth centuries for the fifteenth, our extraordinary international team of scholars came together over just three consecutive days to do something that had never before been attempted in quite this way: a full transcription, edition, and discussion of an entire text, "Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience" (as well as three previously uncatalogued texts appended to it), witnessed in UPenn Ms Codex 660, ff. 86r-95v. This endeavour, which represents both an experiment and a method, is based upon three previous online transcription challenges, which had taken place between May and October 2020: La Sfera Challenges 1 and 2 (Morreale, Keane, and Albritton 2020) and Image du Monde 1 (the second part of which took place in January 2021; Morreale, Keane, and Albritton 2021). The difference with the "Damoiselle Sapience" challenge was the time frame: organized to coincide with the 13th Annual (Virtual) Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age, this event spurred participants to work in a new way. On day one (18th November 2020) a team of transcribers took a folio each and worked to have a completed text by midnight (EST); they also contributed to a transcription statement that logged their communal choices on matters such as expansion of abbreviations. For day two, the work passed on to Team Revision, who reviewed every folio, checking them against the transcription statement and resolving any inconsistencies. This team also produced a finalized version of the crowdsourced transcription statement. On day three, Team Submission ran a final check of the transcription and the statement before collating all of the information into one document and preparing this narrative for submission to the journal. The activities of the three teams were logged in a Google spreadsheet. §3 In her 2015 reflection on crowdsourcing on the Estoria de Espanna project, Polly Duxfield remarked that crowdsourcing requires that "anyone can sign up, regardless of prior qualifications or experience" (Duxfield 2015, 138). Crowdsourcing transcribers is not a new methodological approach to constructing editions of medieval and early modern texts. However, the types of text, and their material and paleographical conditions, impact the efficacy and efficiency of crowdsourcing. Projects like the Estoria de Espanna and Transcribe Bentham (University College London 2021), employ crowdsourcing to various degrees. Like Transcribe Bentham, our team was only required to familiarize themselves with one scribe's hand, which in many ways allowed for a broader range of paleographic experience in our volunteers. One consideration for the project was the time constraint of transcribing, proofing, and contextualizing an edition for publication in three days. Volunteers were required to complete the assigned duties within the allotted time (twenty-four hours per team). Dividing our participants into three teams-transcribe, review, and submit-with each team consisting of international members, alleviated the burden of being present for the 72-hour period.
Criticisms of some crowdsourcing projects have focused on the potential exploitation of participants' time for no reward. Our project, however, avoided this problem by providing participants with a publication for their CVs as an outcome. §4 Laura Morreale, the event coordinator, saw the challenges posed by the pandemic as an opportunity to see the world in a new way and explore the way we use digital technologies. In her paper "Distant Gatherings," presented to the 13th Schoenberg Symposium, she explained that we need to reconfigure how we work and capitalize on the characteristics of the digital medium (Morreale 2020a). The "Damoiselle Sapience" event was a "test case for a digital strategy" that would challenge the boundaries of the accepted scholarly experience, drawing together over thirty scholars to produce communally in three days what might take a lone scholar or a small team months to achieve (Morreale 2020b). The effort made use of multiple digital tools and platforms: Zoom for meetings, FromThePage as the transcription platform, Wordpress to advertise the event and outline the rules (Morreale 2020b), Twitter to share our endeavours with the world in real time, email for general communication, Google Forms to make group decisions, and Microsoft Word and Google Docs to write the submission. However, the main channel for communication and decisions was Slack. Slack offers a number of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) features including channels (which operate like chat rooms for different subjects) and direct messaging. It provided us with a forum in which we could discuss issues and assign tasks quickly, as well as build a sense of community and camaraderie. §5 Each team operated under its own Slack channel: #Team-Transcription, #Team-Revision, and #Team-Submission. Though this system helped keep our tasks separate and streamlined, the collaborative nature of Slack meant that we all had access to each other's team discussions. For the transcription team, that facilitated in-themoment confirmations of minim counts, tricky letterforms, and variant spellings.
Revision editors could then double-check the chat logs of #Team-Transcription when they had a question, and members of the Submission Team could refer back to both when compiling the final document. As one team member put it, working together on Slack in this way was akin to living out a time-lapse photo. By collaborating simultaneously across time-zones and continents, we could see not only the "bones" of the edition and the invisible labour that it entails, but also imagine the final, completed product as a group. What started out as a perfunctory digital tool for teamwork instead enabled a meta-reflection on the editing process itself. §6 The benefits of this challenge have been far greater than first imagined.
Sharing a previously untranscribed text with the world greatly enhances extant scholarship, because this text adds not only to the quantity of Middle French texts available, but also to the diversity of medieval voices that we can research and share with our students. There was also an intense joy found in engaging with a text so deeply alongside so many other scholars, especially amidst a global and isolating pandemic.
This collaborative edition represents a new way to think about the textual editing process, given that traditional models prioritize the lone scholar or a small group of scholars working asynchronously, and rarely stipulate that the work should be done over the course of only three days. One drawback of the time-crunch was that some elements of this edition are not as thorough as we would like in a traditionally edited text (for instance, we have barely scratched the surface regarding in-text theological references)-after all, we endeavoured to produce a rigorously prepared edition for publication in just seventy-two hours. This new style of work was not only productive but intellectually rejuvenating, and its success is thanks to the energetic collaboration of all involved. The online format of the challenge created a greater sense of community than many academic conferences (which are financially and logistically prohibitive for many scholars), while the communal atmosphere facilitated by Slack and email levelled the playing field between enthusiastic novices and seasoned researchers. Finally, this challenge provided a successful model for future editorial teams to use and adapt to their own needs. §7 And certainly, it was not only the conditions brought about by the pandemic that inspired the desire to gather around one particular source and to work collaboratively on it, since similar methodologies and the tools to carry them out have existed for some time. However, the specific occasion that brought these scholars together-that is, a conference focused on manuscript studies that was unexpectedly moved online due to the pandemic-inspired a manuscript-based event using the digital forum that aimed to stand in for or even replicate some of the interaction that often takes place at a scholarly event like a conference. What we produced over the course of seventytwo hours is a testament to the aggregation of smaller bits of communication-to the Slack messages, external emails, zoom calls, Google Doc comments-making up the event. And just as in-person conferences usually have a theme around which many conversations and ideas turn, and which often give way to new research and ways of thinking, so too did the digital event have a planned and executed theme. The UPenn MS Codex 660 was the theme, and the edition below is the outcome of all the conversations we had and thought-work the scholarly-themed meeting inspired. Keeping in mind, however, the ephemeral nature of most computer-based scholarship, participants have also taken the step of archiving all the digital objects and data created for the event in the Medieval Studies online repository BodoArXiv . As with past transcription challenges, archiving followed the project cataloguing norms put forth in the Digital Documentation Process (Fostano and Morreale 2019). §8 Despite the event's positive results, certain modifications might be adopted by future collaborative projects that look to the "Damoiselle Sapience" event as a prototype. Although the project's website brought together all the digital tools used in the effort, participation assumed a comfort with many platforms that some team members might not have possessed. A short training session or introduction to the tools might have increased participant ease and added a pedagogical component to the event. Furthermore, the event's experimental nature was predicated upon a certain skills-threshold among all participants and required a high level of vigilance from the event coordinator to provide encouragement or to problem-shoot. Particularly when choosing an appropriate text for collaborative transcription, organizers should be aware of the skills needed, and the event coordinator prepared to facilitate and support team members when necessary. Finally, the short time frame required several contributors to fulfill more than one kind of labour to produce our submission, which in turn complicated how credit was assigned. More so than other co-authored or team projects, all participants were instrumental in creating the final submission, if only through the enthusiasm and public-facing attention they brought to the event. Assigning credit for each person's labour was therefore one of the most challenging aspects of the event's positive outcomes, and we are therefore thankful to the editors of this journal, the Digital Medievalist, for allowing us to name all participants as co-authors, though with their principal tasks listed above. One final take-away from this experiment is the realization that the digital medium can create collaborative spaces that may, in turn, require a shift in how we engage, respond to, and credit humanities researchers, thereby opening the door to a more diverse group of participants and learners. On ff. 1r-85v, there is "A copy of Frère Robert's Château périlleux" (in which, on ff. 51r-63v, there is "An Account of the Passion of Jesus Christ"). The Chasteau perilleux dates to the second half of the fourteenth century; Jonas-IRHT offers a date of composition of 1368 (IRHT 2022), although Sr. Marie Brisson has identified the author as one Robert de Saint-Martin who died in 1388, providing an ante-quem (Brisson 1966). Folios 86r-95v have until now been believed to contain a single second work, the anonymous "Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience." However, in the course of our transcription, it became clear that they contain three to four distinct shorter works-The "Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience" (ff. 86r-89r); "De l'ardent amour" (f. 89r-v); paraphrases of writings by the Church Fathers (ff. 89v-90v); and a collection of didactic aphorisms (ff. 90v-95v)-which might or might not be separate from the paraphrased writings that precede them. None of the latter three texts seem to have been identified as of yet per consultation of the Jonas-IRHT database.
2.1.1 Language §11 The linguistic characteristics of the text confirm its mid-fifteenth century provenance with little regional lexical or linguistic idiosyncrasies to pinpoint an exact geographical location for the scribe or the text itself. At a period of linguistic transition for the French language, it is not surprising to find inconsistencies in spelling and grammar, as was the case for many other manuscript exemplars of the time. §12 A few isolated cases support though do not convincingly prove the previously mentioned vague French northern location. For instance, the substitution of the French ‛oi‛ for an ‛e‛ in words of Latin origin where this diphthong replaced the Latin ‛i‛ as in ‛veez‛ (f. 86r) for ‛voyez‛ (from the Latin videre) could be indicative of Normandy.
The use of the spelling ‛angre‛ for the more typical ‛ange‛ also points to this region ("Ange" 2022). The only example of this spelling in the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français comes from Le Livre du champ d'or, whose provenance has been identified as Normandy other such lists in that it begins at the feet and then the hands, rather than the head.
The reference to the breast and breastfeeding (f. 88r) implies that this text's author was conversant with the devotion to breastmilk, perhaps in the form of the Madonna Lactans and the Virgin's breastmilk that St. Bernard received in a vision (Sperling 2018), that became popular starting in the mid-fifteenth century. The physical elements evokedthe description of the infant body, the declaration of "how happy is the mother who breastfeeds this mouth, who often smells the divine odor of such a beautiful child, and who kisses the sweet little savory mouth whenever she wants"-are also a call to affective piety, similar to what we see in other contemporaneous Middle French texts (Kaplan 2016, 229), implying that the composition of the "Pèlerinage" may well coincide with the confection of the manuscript in which this lone copy is found. §15 The second text, "De l'ardent amour" ["On Fervent Love"], follows as a logical transition from Damoiselle Sapience's declaration that "marvelous love enters into my heart and remains there forever" (f. 89r), which closes out the first text. Not even a full folio long, the text explains the concept of love as the rejection of worldly pleasures and the doing of good deeds, which love brings the soul up to the companionship of angels, martyrs, and virgins. §16 This is followed on f. 89v by "Auctorités de pluseurs docteurs" ["Writings of Several Doctors"], which contains paraphrases from the works of notable theologians and other patristic figures, including Saints Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Nicasius, Gregory, and Bernard. While the text is generally aimed at promoting virtuous behaviour and thought, it does seem to be a bit of a hodge-podge, combining metaphor with specific examples of bad behaviours to avoid (and types of people to avoid becoming) and devoting uneven attention to its various sources as it moves between them. It does not seem to be aimed specifically at a male versus female audience, though the emphasis on worldly concerns (like paying a person when they have earned their "loyer" ["financial compensation"] [f. 90r]) does imply a secular audience. §17 The final text, which spans ff. 90v-95v, is entitled "Pluseurs auctorités" ["Many Writings"] (making it unclear whether it is truly a separate text from the preceding "Auctorités de pluseurs docteurs") and comprised of didactic aphorisms, including a version of the classic "spare the rod and spoil the child." Touching on subjects such as charitable giving, passing judgment, pride, envy, and other sins of the flesh, as might be expected, it also warns against excessive asceticism born of pride, and deliberate ignorance. Given the abrupt shift on f. 94v to a Latin citation, its literal translation, and an explanation of it, followed shortly by a paraphrase of Pseudo-Seneca and other paraphrases akin to those found in the "Auctorités de pluseurs docteurs," it seems unlikely that this text was originally composed all at once. That is, it appears to be a re-writing of the author's collection of inspirational sayings taken at various points from a variety of texts. While this would seem to point to a male author (more likely to be delivering sermons inspired by such proverbs), it is worth pointing out the use of the female form ‛cellez‛ ["those women"] at two points, which implies the inclusion of women among the listeners of the work or any oral version of it.
3 Transcription rules and methodology §18 Taking into account that, in the case of our manuscript, we are dealing with a single text (or, as we discovered, texts), we decided to adopt a perspective appropriate for the new philology (Spiegel 1990;Driscoll 2010). In line with this framework, we are not imposing a set of transcription norms upon this text but rather responding to those put forth by the scribe. These norms and working methods take on a new significance in the digital age, where recourse to images of the manuscript can be both immediate and uninterrupted. The model for this kind of textual edition is developing but takes its cues from previous collaborative transcription challenges including the La Sfera and Image du Monde events (Morreale, Keane, and Albritton 2020; Morreale, Keane, and Albritton 2021). Therefore, our edition does not aim to provide a definitive answer to what appears on the page, but rather an interpretation that also recognizes the reader's role in receiving the text by modernizing certain elements, as below, for ease of reading.
We declined to add modern accent marks.
3.1.6 Spacing and word segmentation §25 Rather than consistently adding or eliminating spaces between words to more closely correspond with modern orthography, we left word segmentation to the discretion of individual transcribers. Where letters were elided between words, we declined to add apostrophes.
If a word spanned a line break, and this rupture was marked by the scribe, the division was indicated by a hyphen /-/, for example, at 89r, 'de-mourez' (spanning lines 10-11).
3.1.7 Spelling §26 We followed our manuscript's original spelling, transcribing unusual or atypical spellings without comment; for instance, terminal /z/ on words spelled with a terminal /s/ in modern French were left as-is (e.g., 'filz' [89r.25, word 2]). As above, we modernized certain letter forms for ease of reading.

Layout and paratext
3.2.1 Catchwords and foliation §27 Our folios lack catchwords and include but one set of foliation. Rendered in Hindu-Arabic numerals, in black ink, in a modern hand, it appears on each folium at the upper right hand recto. We declined to transcribe this feature.
3.2.2 Marginalia §28 Due to constraints of the format, marginalia are listed below instead of being incorporated into the edition.

3.2.3
Mise-en-page §29 Our scribe copied in a single column throughout. We preserved line breaks as they appear in the manuscript, indicating each break with a single return.

Decoration and additions
3.3.1 Additions §31 We described the sole addition-an institutional stamp centred at bas de page on 95v-at the bottom of the corresponding section of the transcription, with a brief note within square brackets. Similarly, we marked up smaller, in-line coloured initials as follows, <span style="color:blue; font-weight:bold;">H</span>ee (89r.22); <span style="color:red; font-weight:bold;">A</span>mour (89r.12).

Initials
(Colour does not render in this journal‛s type. To see how the team coded for colour in the manuscript, go the file "PelerinageXML.xml" in the project's online archive ].) 3.3.3 Rubrication §33 Throughout the manuscript, majuscules are heightened by addition of a stroke of ink, now often brown, but likely originally plain yellow, which has oxidized. We transcribed these as bolded majuscules, thus, <span style="font-weight:bold;">D</span>e (89r.05, word 5).

Text
repentant · Saint augustin dit que · iiii · manieres de gens sont qui moult desplaisent a dieu · le premier est le vieul luxurieux · Le riche sans ausmone · Le sage sans bonne vertu · Et le jenne sans obedience · Quatre raisons sont pour quoy dieu rescoit les siens de ce monde · La premiere si est pource que le monde nest mye digne de eulx avoir · la seconde pource que quant ilz sont en bon estat il ne veult mye quilz se muent ou par adversite ou par prosperite · La tierce est pour acomplir leur desir pechie aux paines denfer · Mais plus dure chose est courcer la majeste de dieu · Saint jherosme 2 dit que tout le temps quon ne pense a dieu on le 3 doit tenir pour temps perdu · Et dit il mesmes que plus suis entre les hommes tant me treuve 4 je mains homme · Saint nichaise dit de la chose dont il me souvient le mains cest de ce que on ma 5 meffait · Salmon dit que cest gregnieur chose de vaincre son courage que prendre une forte cite · car par pacience est congneue sapience · Saint gregoire dit que la raison pour quoy nostre sire consenti que il fust feru de la lance ou coste se fut pour 6 ce que nos prensissons son ceur toutes fois que nous vousissons · Bon ceur doit avoir · vii · conditions 2 Marginalia, in left margin: at line 3, in black ink, in a later hand: three parallel lines, same size "///" 3 Marginalia, in left margin: at line 4, in black ink, in a later hand: "Geb" 4 Marginalia, in left margin: at lines 5-6, in black ink, in a later hand: "Cl" 5 Marginalia, in left margin: at line 8, in black ink, in a later hand: two parallel lines, same size "//" Amer en contrition · pur en affliction · liez en tribulation · piteux en compassion · Droit en en-7 tention · Fervent en devotion · Esleves en contemplation · Saint bernard dit que haulte grace