It has been my good fortune and pleasure to have worked in the company
of computer specialists who have understood the special needs of a humanist
incompletely computer literate. Special thanks are due to John Unsworth,
Director of IATH and my colleague in the English Department, to Associate
Director Thornton Staples, to IBM systems man Oludotun Akinola, to UNIX
specialist Karen Dietz, as well as to Shawn Carnell, Susan Gants, Ross
Wayland, and Pete Yadlowsky, all of whom helped me over many technical
and conceptual hurdles, some of my own creation, with unfailing competence,
courtesy, and charity. Jason Haynes has helped me in innumerable ways,
most recently by providing the HTML markup for this report. Special
gratitude is due as well to Christie D. Stephenson, Assistant Fine Arts
Librarian at the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library, who oversaw the production
of the color digital images from slides, and to David Seaman, Director
of Electronic Texts, and his helpful staff, for assisting with the production
of images from the flatbed scanner and for answering my limitless questions.
I am deeply indebted to John Price-Wilkin, who helped me create a DTD
for both the Archive and SEENET and taught me to appreciate the
elegant complexity of SGML.
My co-editors of The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Robert
Adams, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, have done
a great deal of the work that went into the report, writing sections,
checking transcriptions, conferring on a myriad of questions small and
large. I look forward to many years of collaboration with them on this
project.
IATH generously supplied me with equipment, travel monies, and funds
for purchasing color images of the manuscripts. Its monies have made
it possible to hire a number of talented graduate students from the
English and Classics departments at the University of Virginia. They,
in spite of never having worked before with medieval handwritten documents
and in most cases without initial knowledge of Middle English, have
worked faithfully over many months in learning medieval hands, Middle
English, and (often) new computer programs. I am grateful to Christopher
Copeland, David Cox, Jack Chafin, Monique Dull, Alexander Luhrmann,
Stephen Ramsay, Nancy Renwick, and Dominique Woodall for many hours
of labor on an exacting task. I am grateful to Gail Duggan, who has
worked on this project forty to fifty hours a week since September.
I am grateful to the staffs of the manuscript departments of the Huntington
Library, San Marino, CA; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; The British Library,
London; Cambridge University Library, Cambridge; Corpus Christi College,
Oxford; and Trinity College, Cambridge, all of whom provided photographic
copies of manuscripts. For manifold kindnesses beyond any professional
responsibility, grateful thanks is given to Dr. David Cooper, Librarian
of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; to Mr. D. J. Hall, Senior Under-Librarian,
Cambridge University Library; to Mr. David J. McKitterick, Librarian,
Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr. Andrew Prescott, Curator, The British
Library, and Dr. Patrick Zutshi, Keeper of Manuscripts and University
Archives, Cambridge University Library. Grateful thanks are due as well
to Mr. S. C. Albert, Director of World Microfilms, for permission to
reproduce images from Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.15.17.
Finally, of course, all of us at IATH are grateful to the IBM Corporation
for the generous grant of funds and equipment that made all of this
possible.
