Where can one find texts in their original language?

by [deleted]

[deleted]

talondearg

I think you're after a product that doesn't exist. People who want to work with the manuscripts either (a) access those digitised images, (b) visit the location where those manuscripts are.

People who aren't working at that level (e.g. myself, I care very little to work on manuscripts per se), generally want an edited edition. The work of transcribing a manuscript almost always involves some level of critical editing, that's why critical editions exist, even for more recent 'historical' texts. Those texts - critical editions with notes about variants, difficulties in the manuscripts, etc.., can be purchased.

But what you are after appears to be something in the middle, and /u/sunagainstgold's suggestion is as good as anything, you might as well hire someone to transcribe it and then print it in whatever format makes you happy.

sunagainstgold

Are you asking about transcriptions of manuscripts--that is, someone who will read a digitized scan and write it out in nice neat modern italic? (I assume so, because otherwise you could just print out the digitized scans image by image).

If so, your best bet is probably hiring a broke grad student looking for money to work on whatever particular manuscript you want.

CXR1037

For English, the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database is pretty nifty. It's a project that digitizes works between 1473 (William Caxton's printing of The Recuyell of Troian Histories, the first ever in English) to ~1900.

Most, if not all, are black and white photocopies from various libraries. You can download the files and print them out, and that's probably about as close to having the real thing as you're gonna get.

Some files are in better shape than others. Some, particularly more popular pieces, will be accompanied by digital text from text-recognition software, so it's not great, either. A few I've come across have introductions/essays written by modern scholars explaining/contextualizing the file.

Unfortunately, I think you have to pay a lot^1 to access it if you aren't part of an institution. My school's library pays for access to it. You might be able to find some stuff on the British Library virtual books website, though. They have decent quality scans of some original texts.

^1 - just checked and EEBO subscriptions are over $100,000 it looks like. So join an institution/university or find someone who's a part of one.