The Electronic Texts
of the
Prose Works of Alfonso X, El Sabio
prepared by
Lloyd Kasten, John Nitti,
and
Wilhelmina Jonxis-Henkemans

Madison, 1997

    With the present publication the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Ltd. proudly initiates its CD-ROM Series. This new publication medium will enable us to provide electronically stored information at the lowest possible cost to interested institutions and individuals alike.

    This CD-ROM contains a complete set of texts and concordances of the Alfonsine corpus currently housed in magnetic form at the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies in Madison, Wisconsin. Therefore, in addition to those Royal Scriptorium texts and concordances originally published by us on microfiches in 1978, we have added the non-Royal Scriptorium mss. of the General Estoria II, V, and VI. Our electronic transcription of the General estoria III, delayed in part because of the untimely death of our dear friend and indefatigable collaborator, Wilhelmina Jonxis Henkemans, is not close enough to completion to justify holding up this publication any longer.

    All texts have been transcribed using the quasi-algebraic norms set forth in A Manual of Manuscript Transcription for the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language, Mackenzie/Burrus, 4th edition, HSMS, Ltd., 1986, which is still available through the HSMS, Ltd. A very brief transcription coding summary of that manual follows.

    These norms are conservative and attempt to reproduce the original printed text as faithfully as possible, representing certain aspects of original page format and layout, as well as respecting original orthography, punctuation, and, whenever reasonable, perceived patterns of word separation. Original contraction, elision, apocope, and apheresis have been preserved. All instances of transcriber emendation are clearly flagged, with editorial deletions being enclosed within parentheses and editorial additions within square brackets.

    Manuscript foliation, i.e., folio number and folio side (recto or verso), is given, preceded by fol. within brackets at the beginning of each folio side, e.g., [fol. 1r]. The column layout of a folio side is denoted by a {CB. (column boundary) mnemonic, which, by means of a numeric suffix ({CB 1., {CB2., etc.) describes the physical disposition of columns of text on a given folio. Textual material contained within each column and folio side is enclosed within braces. Braces also enclose all mnemonic codes and their accompanying text: Rubrics {RUB.}, miniatures {MIN.}, text in Latin {LAT.}, initial letters {IN.} (where IN is followed by an Arabic numeral indicating the number of lines the initial occupies), illustrations or decorative borders {ILL.}, blank spaces left for text but in which none appears {BLNK.}, and catchwords or signature gathering marks {CW.}.

    Other common coding symbols are angular brackets < >, used to enclose textual expansion of abbreviations; the asterisk *, used tosignal reconstruction of illegible text; the grave accent ` following a letter signals that that previous letter appears as superscript in the original text, while multiple grave accents indicate more than one contiguous superscript character; the plus sign +, is used when the logical reading flow of the text contained within a mnemonic is interrupted by syntactically unrelated intervening text; the percent sign %, representing the Spanish calderón, may be followed by the number 2, e.g., %2, then indicating that the text which follows it is the logical, concluding portion of the previous line. The dollar sign $ following a letter indicates that that letter was written or typeset upside down. Question marks within square brackets [??] stand for illegible text. The ñ is transcribed as the letter n followed by a tilde. The tilde may also represent an abbreviation mark either maintained or suppressed. The ç is transcribed as c followed by an apostrophe c’.

    Punctuation is never editorially regularized. The transcription endeavors to represent faithfully the punctuation system found in the original text by using the corresponding modern equivalent symbols whenever possible. Given that single parentheses stand for deletion (either scribal or editorial, with scribal deletions being differentiated from editorial by the presence of a caret ^) double parenthesis are perforce used to represent parentheses as punctuation marks in original text. Similarly, the double hyphen indicatea dash found as punctuation in the original text. A single hyphen at line- or page-end is preserved, if one exists in the original, or has been editorially inserted in an undifferentiated way to link a word which is devided over line boundaries.

    While the presence and position of miniatures is indicated in the transcription by the {MIN.} mnemonic, the nature, size, or illustrative content of the miniature is not normally described. Blank lines present in the original text which were not intended to contain text are not represented in the transcription.

    The following list of textual sources gives in boldface type the three-character abbreviation used to associate each text with its corresponding concordances and indexes. Those files which contain the textual transcriptions all share the file name TEXT followed by the corresponding three-character extension of the source text. Similarly, the concordances are contained in files named CONCORD, followed by the corresponding three-character extension of the text file. Files bearing the name ALFAINDX contain the alphabetically sorted list of keywords with frequency counts, with a merged alphabetic index of all texts contained in ALFAINDX.ALL; files named DESINDX contain the list of keywords with frequency counts sorted in descending frequency of occurrence; files named REVINDX contain a list of keywords sorted in reverse alphabetic order, with like suffixes clustered together.

ALB 1254?-1260? - Canones de Albateni: Paris: Arsenal 8322

ACE 1283 - Libros de ajedrez, dados y tablas: Escorial: Monasterio T.I.6

AST 1277 - Libros del saber de astronomia: Madrid: Universitaria 156

CRZ 1259 - Libro de las cruzes: Madrid: Nacional 9294

EE1 1270-1284 - Estoria de Españía: Escorial: Monasterio

EE2 1284?-1345? - Estoria de España: Escorial: Monasterio X14

GEI 1272-1275 - General estoria 1: Madrid: Nacional 816

G2K s.XIV - General estoria IL Madrid: Nacional 10237

GE4 1280 - General estoria IV.- Roma: Vaticana Urb. Lat. 5

G5R s.XV - General estoria V.- Escorial: Monasterio R.I. 10

GE5 s.X111-XIV - General estoria V.- Escorial: Monasterio 1

GE6 s.XIV - General estoria VI: Toledo: Catedral 43-20

JUZ 1254? - Judizos de las estrellas: Madrid: Nacional 3065

LAP 1250?- 1279? - Lapidario de Alfonso X: Escorial: Monasterio h.l. 15

LEY 1256?-1265? - Libro de las leyes: London: British Library Add. 20787

MOA 1250? - Moamyn-Libro de las animalias: Madrid: Nacional RES. 270

PIC 1256? - Picatrix de Alfonso X?: Roma: Vaticana Reg. Lat. 1283

RAB 1277? - Libro del cuadrante señero: Paris: Arsenal 8322

YMG 1276-1279 - Libro de las formas y de las imagenes: Escorial: Monasterio h.l. 16

ZRQ 1254?-1260? - Tablas de Zarquiel: Paris: Arsenal 8322

In closing, we wish to acknowledge the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, without whose support the
original electronic transcriptions of the Alfonsine Royal Scriptorium texts could never have been completed.

Call number     Z115. S7. B84.