Editorial Principles for 'Elisabeth Charlotte (Liselotte), Madame Palatine. Digital Edition of the Heidelberg Letters'

The starting point for the transcription of the 47 letters to Madame de Ludre (call number Heid. Hs. 3903) was the edition by Jürgen Voss, "Die Briefe der Herzogin Elisabeth Charlotte von Orléans an die ehemalige Versailler Hofdame Madame de Ludres (1687-1722)", in: Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, 129 (1981), p. 234ff. The author had kindly made these available to the University Library for a first digital presentation in 2010.

The remaining letters were transcribed and translated by Wolfgang Metzger (transcription of the French letters) and Karin Zimmermann (transcription of the German letters).

Voss's contribution was also an important source for commenting on and indexing the content.

The edition basically consists of two layers: the transcription on the one hand, and the editorial treatments including the index links on the other. The user can decide whether the editorial editing is to be displayed in the text representation of the transcription, whether it is to be included in marked form, or whether it is to be visualised in the text representation without being displayed separately.

The Transcriptions in TEI - Text Display, Editorial Principles and Normalisations

  • The TEI transcriptions are faithful to the facsimile and depict the letters exactly to the page, column and line. Text alignment (left-justified, right-justified, centred) is also taken into account.
  • The line count starts anew for each letter page, it does not extend across pages.
  • Hyphens, apostrophes and diacritical marks (especially accents) are adopted according to the letters.
  • Deletions, overwritings, substitutions and insertions have been faithfully transferred to the letters in the TEI transcription.
  • The text contents of the addresses on the backs of the letters have been transferred into the transcription as far as they have been preserved.
  • Abbreviations were resolved if they were marked as such in the transcription.
  • The normalisation of letters is carried out for the abbreviation stroke above the letters "m" and "n" (e.g. com̄e becomes comme).
  • Obvious spelling errors have been identified and corrected.
  • Missing letter pages are marked as such.
  • The transcription has been enriched with comments on the content.
  • Literature references have been implemented within comments.
  • Persons, corporate bodies and places that appear in the letters are - as far as possible - marked and clearly identified with reference to the GND Integrated Authority File. Combinations are also possible. If an entity is named that is both a place and a body (e.g. Versailles), both can be marked. If several persons are meant by a term (e.g. "the grandchildren"), the term is assigned several GND numbers. The same is possible with places and corporate bodies.

Translations

  • The present translations were prepared by Wolfgang Metzger (Heidelberg University Library).
  • A separate TEI file was created for each translation. These are linked to the text structure of the TEI transcription of the original letters. This makes it possible to link the two files in terms of content and form in TEI.