1. Description (<msDescription>)
The <msDescription> element encodes a description of a medieval or
renaissance manuscript
The <msDescription>
element, as elaborated in this document, is of the length and complexity that
it may best be used for encoding medieval and renaissance manuscripts
catalogued ex novo, or legacy data of this material in the form of extant
catalogues of medieval and renaissance manuscripts. As such, the <msDescription> element may be placed anywhere that a
paragraph might appear. However, the
<msDescription> element may also appear in the header of a TEI conformant
document, when the description of a manuscript forms part of the metadata to be
associated with a digital representation of the manuscript, whether as a
transcription, as a collection of digital images, or as some combination of the
two. In this case the <msDescription> should
appear within the <sourceDesc>
element of the header.
The <msDescription>
element has the following seven subelements, of which only <msIdentifier>
is mandatory; if <msHeading> is present, it must occur directly after
<msIdentifier>. The remaining
five subelements may occur in any order and are repeatable.
The subelements, with their definitions, are:
See the appropriate section below for a more discursive
treatment of each subelement.
As well as the four global attributes, the element
<msDescription> has several attributes to meet its specific needs: status; composite; type; dateAttrib. The status attribute is shared with three
other elements (<msPart>, <msContents> and <msItem>); for a
damaged manuscript (or manuscript part, or section of texts, or single text),
it states the amount of the book that remains:
"frag" meaning that only a fragment remains; "def"
meaning that the manuscript has largely survived, that it is merely defective;
"unk" meaning that the proportion of surviving codex to what has been
lost is unknown.
The attribute "composite" with its closed list of
values is shared with <msPart>.
In both cases it serves to answer "yes," "no" or
"unknown" to the question: is
this manuscript composite? is it
composed of more than one part of separate physical origin?
The "type" attribute is employed here and for
<msPart> to perform the watershed sort between the manuscripts of textual
interest and those of archival or legal origin by use of the explicit
statement: type="dipl" (for
"diplomatic") for the manuscripts relating to diplomatics. Overall, the present extension to the TEI
set of elements and the present documentation were written for the encoding of
descriptions of text manuscripts, or codices, not for documentary or legal
materials. Nevertheless, a certain
minimum of description is provided here for archival material, since legal
documents occur with fair regularity as pastedowns and flyleaves of codices,
and as the occasional denizens of libraries that wish to describe all their
medieval and renaissance holdings with one set of encoding rules. Significantly absent in the present system
is the encoding that would structure these early archival materials in to
series, boxes, folders and so forth.
A fourth attribute, used by both
<msDescription> and <msPart> and of crucial importance to the
field, is "dateAttrib" with its closed list of values: dated; datable; unknown; there is no default
value. Since the vast majority of manuscripts of this period are not dated by
the scribe, nor are they datable by the cataloguer with a combination of
internal and external factors, it is all the more important to have at one's
fingertips the manuscripts that do meet the criteria of either category. Careful and consistent use of the
"dateAttrib" attribute will allow a user to winnow his search results
to precisely these manuscripts. The
attributes on "evidence" for the element <origDate> mimic
albeit rather imperfectly the information given by the "dateAttrib"
attribute on <msDescription> and <msPart>; the correspondence is:
<msDescription>: |
<origDate>: |
dateAttrib="dated" |
evidence="internal" |
dateAttrib="datable" |
evidence="external" |
dateAttribu="unknown" |
evidence="attributed" (by the cataloguer) |
Note: As mentioned above, the smallest possible description is one that
contains only the element <msIdentifier> internally to that element,
only one subelement is required, and the choice of subelement is at the
cataloguer's choice. This is in
recognition of the way many cataloguers work, by starting with a very brief
list of call numbers. The next step,
involving minimalist statements about author, title, place and date, require
that the cataloguer move to the appropriate subelements of
<msDescription> as shown in the following examples.
Examples:
<msDescription><msIdentifier><idno>Plimpton MS
001</idno></msIdentifier></msDescription>
<msDescription><msIdentifier><idno>Plimpton
MS 002</idno></msIdentifier></msDescription>
<msDescription>
<msIdentifier><idno>Plimpton
MS 045</idno></msIdentifier>
<msContents><msItem><author>Boethius</author>
<title>De
musica</title></msItem></msContents>
<history><p><origPlace>Germany</origPlace><lb>
<origDate>s.
XII</origDate></p></history>
</msDescription>