Les Guidelines TEI à l’épreuve de la complexité textuelle et graphique médiévale

The TEI Guidelines represent today an essential standard in the world of textual encoding for digital editions. However, some problems concerning TEI encoding, both theoretical and practical, are far from being definitively resolved. In this context we firstly discuss a theoretical question: what is the nature of the encoding? Are we interested in the Text or in its documentary image? What is the difference between a descriptive encoding and an editorial one? Secondly, we analyse the specific case of the TEI Guidelines application to the Medieval textual and writing reality: indeed, this application risks being anything but automatic, as TEI tags were set in the context of contemporary printed books.