Although the very notion of a final and finite version of a text on a platform as flexible and dynamic as the digital\u00a0may be questioned, one needs to set certain achievable short and long term goals in the preparation of any electronic or digital edition. A good point from which to start are still the questions Peter Robinson, summing up contemporary debates in electronic text-editing, asked more than a decade ago.1<\/sup><\/a>\u2018Where We Are with Electronic Scholarly Editions, and Where We Want to Be\u2019\u00a0\u00a0Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Computerphilologie<\/em>\u00a0Online here<\/a>, January 2004. In print in Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Computerphilologie<\/em> 2004, 123-143.<\/span><\/span> A quick run-through of them at this point might not be irrelevant.<\/p>\n The last question, which is allied to the first, is obviously the thorniest\u00a0of them all. The proliferation of documentary editions based on facsimiles has led Robinson himself to answer them emphatically in the negative.3<\/sup><\/a>Peter Robinson, \u201cTowards a Theory of Digital Editions<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0Variants<\/em>\u00a010 (2013): 105\u201332, p. 127.<\/span><\/span> Elena Pierazzo efficiently summing up the current state of the debate in a recent article defines a diplomatic edition as \u2018an edition of a text based on a single document, which attempts to reproduce a certain degree of the peculiarities of the document itself, even if this may cause disruption to the normal flow of the text presented by the document.\u20194<\/sup><\/a>Elena Pierazzo, \u2018Digital Documentary Editions and the Others<\/a>,\u2019\u00a0\u00a0Scholarly Editing<\/em> 35 (2014), para 3. <\/span><\/span> Elsewhere she asserts that digital documentary editions record \u2018as many features of the original document as are considered meaningful by the editors, displayed in all the ways the editors consider useful for the readers, including all the tools necessary to achieve such a purpose.5<\/sup><\/a> Elena Pierazzo, \u201cA Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions,\u201d\u00a0Literary and Linguistic Computing<\/em>\u00a026, no. 4 (2011) 463\u201377, p. 475.<\/span><\/span> She finds that the single greatest obstacle to critical editions with multiple witnesses is a lack of strong intellectual investment in standardization and collaboration across nations and disciplines.6<\/sup><\/a>Pierazzo, \u2018Documentary Editions and the Others\u2019, op. cit. para 19<\/span><\/span> In this respect, the present project might be said to be taking a step in the recommended direction.<\/p>\n As is quickly apparent from even the most cursory glance at the participants of the debate (including the writers mentioned above), most discussion about the normative digital edition stems from the practical experience of the scholars involved in it (as indeed it does for print editors). Many of the essays in Unsworth et. al.7<\/sup><\/a>Electronic Textual Editing<\/em>, op. cit.<\/span><\/span> available as preview in the Text Encoding Initative\u2019s Archive<\/a> pages deal with TEI projects and most of the contributors of A Companion to Digital Humanities<\/em><\/a> are humanities scholars or librarians who have been involved in their own digital projects for years.8<\/sup><\/a>Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities<\/em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).<\/span><\/span> The theories of scholarly\u00a0editing perforce stem from pragmatic premises, but in the case of digital editions, the material perhaps\u00a0dictates editorial principles and choices to a greater degree than in a print edition. So is it with this project.<\/p>\n Although not as vast as, say, the corpus of Foxe\u2019s Acts and Monuments<\/em>, Anne Askew\u2019s two examinations have survived in quite a few witnesses in four contemporary editions. More interestingly, several of the extant copies of the editions are censored, having had certain pages cut or pasted together. While the very presence of multiple witnesses makes the idea of a collated edition viable, the censored versions coupled with the voice of John Bale (the original editor or \u2018presenter\u2019 of the texts) demand critical commentary. Also, the bewildering amount of biblical citations on almost every page that shore up Bale\u2019s commentary is rich ground for analysis of the kind of references used by militant reformers like Bale. But the arguments for a diplomatic image-based edition for the texts are also strong. Apart from facilitating the study of font usage, printer\u2019s decorations, woodcuts and other visual aspects of the physical text, presenting facsimile images along with transcription could be especially appropriate for the censored copies of the books<\/p>\n\n