A Computer-Assisted Collation of Earl Rivers’ Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers

Abstract

Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers’ Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers (Dicts) is one of the earliest books printed by William Caxton at Westminster. This long compilation of miscellaneous proverbial literature is extant in four editions and seven manuscripts, which testify to a widespread circulation in England between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The latest in a series of English translations of Guillaume de Tignonville’s Ditz moraulx des philosophes, the Dicts is the only version lacking a critical edition and a comprehensive study of its tradition. Although previous scholarship assumed that all manuscript witnesses are almost verbatim copies or epitomized versions of the prints, specific analyses disclose a more complex situation. Substantial variations have also been recorded in the printed editions, but they have never been exhaustively mapped. The largeness and complexity of this tradition, which combines prints and manuscripts, full copies, fragments, and epitomes, represents an ideal testing ground for the use of computer-assisted collation procedures. The article proposes a comparison of two digital tools, namelyCollateX and Juxta, for the collation of a passage of the Dicts.