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:

  • <msIdentifier> groups information from the holding institution that serves to uniquely identify one manuscript.
  • <msHeading>  contains brief database-like statements about key elements of a manuscript, intended for quick viewing by the user.
  • <msContents> encloses the section, or sections, of a manuscript or manuscript part that describes its intellectual content.
  • <physDesc> contains the physical description of a manuscript.
  • <history> contains information concerning the history of a manuscript from the moment of its production to the present day.
  • <additional> groups information relating to curatorial issues, and to the bibliography and subject headings of the manuscript as a whole.
  • <msPart> contains the description (intellectual, physical and historical) of a manuscript or manuscript fragment that shares the binding with another manuscript but that is of separate origin.

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>