With a few notable exceptions, traditional corpus linguistic methods have focused on linguistic rather than peritextual features, while the enterprise of digital editing has paid more attention to the latter. Over the last decade, the rising prominence of the field of digital humanities has served to bring together these two disciplines by means of common annotation schemata and, more crucially still, has fostered a renewed sense that a comprehensive understanding of the primary source is useful to both linguists and archivists. Today, by means of careful digital editing, many contextual and co-textual features of the artefact can be recorded in a searchable and quantifiable format along with the text itself.

This article presents a TEI XML-based system of peritextual annotation developed by the authors as part of the Gatekeepers of Knowledge project. In addition to discussing the annotation model in some detail, we present some of the first findings of a pilot study on the title-pages of books by the seventeenth-century medical author Nicholas Culpeper. The pilot project will demonstrate the usefulness of the system of annotation and the preliminary findings will support the observation made in earlier scholarship that Culpeper’s main publishers can be effectively divided into two competing branches.