Matthew Prior was an eighteenth-century British poet and diplomat. Extant letters to and from him, written between 1684 and 1721, number nearly 3,000. His named correspondents number 283 and range from aristocrats and ministers of state to prisoners of war and the intriguingly but insufficiently named "Babette". The manuscripts of these letters, which are scattered among thirty-six different repositories from Denmark to California, have been calendared by Miami University Libraries' digital project The Matthew Prior Project; and this annotated calendar is freely available online at http://digital.lib.muohio.edu/prior/.

Of the 3,000 letters, most are in English, but there are several hundred in French, and there is the occasional Latin or Greek quotation as well. Additionally, there are letters written during sensitive times when secrecy was necessary that employ a numerical cipher which the recipients have sometimes decoded on the manuscripts and sometimes not. Most are straight prose, but many include bits of verse as well, usually Prior's own. Most follow a letter format conventional for the times, but some vary from that format. Many of the manuscripts are in the letter-writer's handwriting, some are largely scribal with only a few lines and the complimentary close and signature in the letter-writer's hand, others are letterbook copies in a scribe's hand prepared as "retained copies" for the letter-writer. These are some of the features of these documents which I have considered in making editorial and mark up decisions.

My paper will discuss how the TEI Guidelines, particularly in the P5 version, have influenced these decisions, enlarged my vision of what an electronic edition can and ought to be, and, not coincidentally, enhanced my understanding of "text". I will illustrate my remarks via a live hook-up to the Prior Project web site and its "mini edition" of six letters, all written by Prior and dated between 1697 and 1718. This mini edition, which I am organizing as a corpus and preparing using the XML editor <oXygen/> , is nearing completion. It will demonstrate the project's long-term aim of providing an electronic edition of the letters, annotated and including images of every letter together with both diplomatic and standardized transcripts of each letter. The TEI meeting's audience will also have the opportunity to view the administrative pages for the site and the source pages for the texts prepared for the mini edition.