Prepwork

Tomorrow I teach the Morte Darthur. Not the whole thing of course—this is a World Lit course, not one in the History of Literature in English or the English Romance or frankly anything else I'd like to teach but can't thanks to the fact this department runs on "tradition" rather than "job training"—but the "Tale of Lancelot." And I've already decided to write the quiz, because it would be easier to have it done early than to wait until the last minute and have to fight people for the copier. (As you can tell by that last sentence, Caxton's prose has struck again...). Deciding it needed a suitable Caxtonian preface, I went searching for a copy of Caxton's Malory... and discovered that the majority of people have only scanned the modern-spelling editions. Now, I've posted about this kind of intellectual laziness before,* and it's one reason among many that I've tried to OCR the Latin text of Newton's Principia, and have succeeded in putting up a copy of Peter the Nibbler's Historia Scholastica and Boethius' Arithmetica and almost succeeded in putting up his Musica.

I'm looking forward to it, mostly to see what they pick up on. This will be the first time that I've been able to give in-depth coverage to something over which I've written, and in some sense this will be a kind of revision process, except in the class where they look at me blankly. I'm using the big Everyman paperback I convinced Grant to buy, because it has modernized spelling but not grammar. It shouldn't be too bad for them, I think, but then I thought Genji would go well, too.

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* Or I thought I had. Surely somewhere there's a post in which I rant about... or was it an email? Oh, damn.