A digital critical edition

The nineteenth book of pseudo-Aristotle’s Problemata was the first Ancient Greek source discussing music in detail to be rediscovered in the High Medieval period, and it contains much information about musical performance practice that would have been unfamiliar to readers at the time. Pietro d’Abano’s widely read commentary on the work helped generations of readers make sense of that difficult material and even played a role in the development of the concept of harmony.

My digital critical edition of d’Abano’s commentary encodes textual variants from fifteen medieval manuscripts in TEI-compliant XML. I have tagged each variant by type, allowing readers to filter out categories of variants and customize their viewing experience. d’Abano’s compressed references to authors and treatises have been hyper-linked to their standardized forms, and all instances of intervallic proportions and other numbers have been tagged and interpreted with TEI elements.

The digital edition, which is now under review, will be published open access, making this historically significant work easily available to all interested readers.