YLS > Style Guide

The Yearbook of Langland Studies (YLS)

Style Guide

The Yearbook of Langland Studies

Revised January 2008

Journal style.
As per Brepols policy, The Yearbook of Langland Studies follows the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) Style Guide on most matters pertaining to style and documentation of sources; it is available as a .pdf download here. Exceptions and modifications are outlined in the sections below. British usage is followed for spelling and punctuation. Special cases related to Piers Plowman studies and deviations from dictionary usage are listed alphabetically in the word list at the end of this guide.

Submission and formatting of manuscripts.
Manuscripts should be sent electronically, preferably as a Microsoft Word file, to all of the editors listed below. If another word processing program is used, please include a version of the file saved in Rich Text Format (.rtf). Where electronic submission is impracticable for authors, we gladly accept hard copy; in this case please send three copies to any one of the editors. Contact details for the editors of YLS are as follows:

Andrew Cole, English Department, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA (awc@uga.edu)
Fiona Somerset, English Department, Box 90015, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA (somerset@duke.edu); and
Lawrence Warner, Department of English, Woolley Building (A20), University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia (lawrence.warner@usyd.edu.au).

Documents should be double-spaced throughout and written in a 12-point font, preferably a common serifed typeface such as Times New Roman or Baskerville. Please use footnotes rather than endnotes, and ignore the MHRA directive not to use the word-processing program to embed footnotes: DO use that part of your program.

Authors of accepted essays should provide an abstract of the essay and ten keywords together with their final copy. The abstract will appear in the following year's annotated bibliography, and both abstract and keywords are part of Brepols' marketing strategy.

Documentation.
Follow MHRA style. YLS does not provide a separate bibliography of works cited, either within each article or for the volume as a whole. Thus the first citation given for a specific work must include full bibliographic data in the footnote. Subsequent citations can be given in shortened form.

Names of authors should be given as they appear on the title page of the work cited.

Below is a list of the most common forms of full footnote citation used in YLS. If citing more than one source in a single sentence within a note, use semicolons to separate the entries.

Book by a single author:

Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 268–79.

Book by two or three authors (or editors):

D. W. Robertson, Jr. and Bernard F. Huppé, ‘Piers Plowman’ and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 227–29.
Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard, eds., Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 1–12.

Book in a Series

The Oxford English Literary History, gen. ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002- ), II: James Simpson, 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002), pp. 344-45.

Editions and translations other than ‘Piers Plowman’:

Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 187–203.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

Editions of ‘Piers Plowman’.
Since they are cited so frequently, works by William Langland are treated in YLS as a special case. Langland’s name should be omitted in the citation except where it appears as part of a book title. Instead, the name of the editor(s) should be cited first, followed by the title and publication data. For convenience, the most frequently cited editions of Piers Plowman are listed here alphabetically by editor. Authors are not constrained to use only these editions, though the most recent version of a given edition should be used whenever possible.

Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. by George Kane, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. by George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, rev. edn (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. by George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
William Langland: Piers Plowman. A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt, vol. 1 (London and New York: Longmans, 1995); vol. 2 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming).
The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London: Dent/Everyman, 1995).
The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W), ed. by Thorlac Turville-Petre and Hoyt N. Duggan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, in assoc. with the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts, 2002).
The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 5: London, British Library, MS Additional 35287 (M), ed. by Eric Eliason, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and Hoyt N. Duggan (Cambridge: Published for the Medieval Academy of America and SEENET by Boydell & Brewer, 2005).
Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the A-Version, ed. by Thomas A. Knott and David C. Fowler (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1952).
Piers Plowman: The C-Text, ed. by Derek Pearsall rev. edn (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994)
Piers Plowman: The Z Version, ed. by A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983).

Quotations from ‘Piers Plowman’.
Regardless of edition used, quotations from Piers Plowman should be cited in the form A.3.226, B.15.12–24, C.5.1–108, etc. (rather than the MHRA guide’s ‘A, III, 226’, etc.). Except where necessary for the argument at hand, omit editorial brackets and diacritics when quoting from any edition of Piers Plowman. Lines in Latin should be designated thus: ‘Piers Plowman C.5.60a’: i.e., italicized Roman ‘a’ rather than non-italicized ‘a’ or Greek alpha. Non-italicized ‘a’ and ‘b’ after a line number denote half-verses: ‘Hit bycometh for clerkes’ = Piers Plowman C.5.61a. Authors might wish to read Henry Ansgar Kelly's helpful note "Uniformity and Sense in Editing and Citing Medieval Texts", available at http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/KELLY/Editing.htm.

Journal article.
If citing the whole article, provide inclusive page numbers, with any page specifically referenced included after the complete citation in parentheses.

Joseph S. Wittig, ‘The Dramatic and Rhetorical Development of Long Will’s Pilgrimage’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 76 (1975), 52–76 (p. 72).
Ralph Hanna, ‘Emendations to a 1993 “Vita De Ne’erdowel”’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 14 (2000), 185-98.

Article in an edited collection.
Follow guidelines as above.

Anne Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version “Autobiography” and the Statute of 1388’, in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. by Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 208–317 (p. 211).

Titles within titles.
When citing an italicized book title that contains another title within it, the embedded title should be left in italics and enclosed in single quotation marks, as in Robertson and Huppé, ‘Piers Plowman’ and Scriptural Tradition.

Numbers.
In running text, whole numbers between one and one hundred are spelled out. Twenty-one through twenty-nine and so on are hyphenated. Numbers greater than one hundred should be written as arabic numerals, except round figures of hundreds, thousands, hundred thousands, and so on, which should be spelled out.

Ordinal numbers follow the same general rules, except in bibliographic data they are shortened to 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.

Arabic numerals should be used to designate chapters, parts, volumes, or other divisions of a work, even if the text being cited uses roman numerals. For example, a reference to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, book IV, line 1406, should be cited as Troilus and Criseyde 4.1406. Roman numerals are retained if they appear as part of a manuscript shelfmark.

Numbers in series, such as page references or inclusive years, should be separated by an en-dash (not a hyphen) in the form: 237–39; 203–04; 1360–1406; 2005–06.

Abbreviations. Journal names should be expanded and spelled out, both in running text and citations. If the same journal is referenced repeatedly throughout an article, an abbreviation may be introduced in parentheses and used thereafter.

Translation of foreign languages. As a rule, quotations from Latin, Greek, Old French, and Anglo-Norman sources should be translated into English, the translation enclosed in parentheses immediately following the original.

Block quotations. Prose quotations that run to more than six lines in manuscript should be set off as block quotations, indented 1 inch from the left margin, double-spaced and unjustified. Use the same font size as in the main text. Poetry quotations of more than two lines should be set off in the same way.

Ellipses. Ellipses may be used to indicate omission of part of a quoted text, and should be enclosed within square brackets.

Middle English and other special characters. Unicode characters (meaning available in any typeface) for yogh, thorn, aesc, eth, or other obsolete characters are very much preferred to nonstandard typefaces containing special characters, since nonstandard typefaces will not render correctly when substituted by a standard font on a different reader’s computer. If you have not used unicode before, you may find that your wordprocessor does have this capability: please use it if at all possible. If not, we suggest a substitution system to indicate to the editors where special characters should appear. For example: yogh = #; capital yogh = ##; thorn = @, capital thorn = @@; eth = %; aesc = ^ (shift + 6). Whatever system you use to render special characters, please also provide by mail or fax a printed copy indicating where special characters appear and showing the characters correctly rendered in the relevant passages or (if substitutions are used) a printed copy of the substitution key showing each special character correctly rendered alongside its substitute. This simple step will save many headaches and emergency last-minute faxed consultations!

Manuscript citations. Citations to manuscript sources should take the form: City, Repository, MS Shelfmark name and number, fol./fols, recto/verso designation (superscript r or v), and column designation (superscript a or b). For example, a full citation to a series of manuscript folios might look like this: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102, fols 61^va–63^rb.

For Piers Plowman manuscripts commonly designated by sigils, the full citation should be given first, with the sigil introduced in parentheses and used thereafter at the author’s discretion. Remember that the sigil applies only to the text of Piers Plowman in that manuscript, and should not be used to refer to the document itself. Thus, a reference to ‘manuscript V’ really indicates ‘(the text of the A version in) manuscript V’; a reference to the document should be to ‘the Vernon manuscript’ (after the full citation has been given).

Word list. This list contains YLS’s preferred spelling and orthography for many terms specific to Langland studies, as well as some general rules not covered in the sections above and some common abbreviations. Please glance over the full list and make any necessary revisions before submitting your manuscript.

AD (no periods)
apostrophe + s for all singulars (Piers’s, Jesus’s)
Actif
anti- (compounds with anti- are not hyphenated unless the second term is capitalized)
anticlerical
anticlericalism
Antichrist
antifraternalism
anti-Lancastrian
A text (no hyphen as noun)
A-text (adjective)

base text (no hyphen; not to be confused with scribe’s ‘exemplar’; for use of this and related terms, the editors recommend consulting Joseph Dane, ‘Copy-Text and Its Variants in Some Recent Chaucer Editions’, Studies in Bibliography, 44 (1991), 164–83, available online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/toc/sib44toc.htm)
BC (no periods); BCE allowed for authors who insist
Bible
biblical (adj.)
B text (noun)
B-text (adj.)

Clergy
Covetise
chap. / chaps.
c. (circa)
cen. (century)
century compounds = fourteenth century as noun (not 14th); fourteenth-century as adj.
Cleanness
column in MS = superscript a or b following recto/verso designation
copy-text (hyphenated; not to be confused with scribe’s “exemplar”; for use of this and related terms, the editors recommend consulting Joseph Dane, ‘Copy-Text and Its Variants in Some Recent Chaucer Editions’, Studies in Bibliography, 44 (1991), 164–83, available online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/toc/sib44toc.htm)
CT as abbrev. for Canterbury Tales; cite tales by tale name, fragment, and line numbers, as in Man of Law’s Tale 2.1173. After the first citation, standard abbreviations may be used, such as FrT, SumT, etc.
C text (noun)
C-text (adj.)

Dowel, Dobet, Dobest
Death and Life

e.g., (comma after)

EETS (no periods) + o.s., e.s., etc. + volume number, as in EETS o.s. 34 (series designations stop after volume 160)
e.s. = extra series
exemplar (not to be confused with modern editorial terms “base text” and “copy-text”; see those entries above)

fol. / fols as abbrev. for folio / folios
False
Faith
Friar Flatterer

Guile
Gen. Prol. for CT General Prologue (no italics)
Gawain-poet

Holy Church
the Harrowing of Hell
harks back (not hearkens)
Hawkyn

i.e., (comma after)
Imaginatif

Kynde

line(s) = l. / ll. (spell out “lines” where confusing)

MED

Meed not Mede
MS / MSS (no period); spell out as ‘manuscript’ when used as common noun

New Testament (no italics)
n.s. = new series

Old Testament (no italics)
OED
o.s. = original series

passus (lower case; singular as shown; plural with macron over u)
Peace
plowman
Pierce the Plowman’s Crede
Prol. as abbrev. for Prologue of Piers Plowman (not Pro.)
percent (not %); always use arabic numeral preceding percent, not ‘five percent’

quotation (noun)
quote (verb)

Reason
Recklessness
recto = superscript r
repr. = reprint

Study (Dame Study)
Scripture (character in PP)
Scripture (noun)
scriptural (adj.)
sceptical

text (A text; as adj., A-text)
Tree of Charity
Truth

Unity

Visio, Vita (no ital.)
verso = superscript v

Wit
Winner and Waster
Wyclif

Z text (noun)
Z-text (adj.)