Exploring Medieval Mary Magdalene

The Exploring Medieval Mary Magdalene project is an online collection of digital editions containing the legend of Mary Magdalene’s conversion. The project began as the focus of a year-long graduate student seminar held in Harvard’s German Department and conducted by Prof. Racha Kirakosian. Together, this team of philologists and digital humanists has striven to make available the linguistically diverse manuscripts containing this little-known legend in an interactive and fully-searchable format that surpasses the limitations of traditional printed critical editions.

While the study of this particular legend and its manuscripts that this project enables will be in and of itself important for medievalists, Germanists, and codicologists, our team at Harvard has created this resource with an eye to establishing a set of standards for the creating digital editions from manuscripts in order to ease the way for future scholarly efforts in digitalization. Conforming to existing TEI guidelines, our team has established a set of best practices useful for the TEI tagging of textual phenomena ranging from variant spellings and punctuation to scribal corrections and editorial interpolations.