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Two approaches to the development of medieval text corpora can be distinguished among the projects carried out since a few decades. The first one consists of digitizing modern critical editions, and the second one is concerned with the production of precise diplomatic transcriptions of manuscripts, often directly linked to the photographs of the originals. These approaches are in fact complementary rather than contradictory, as they make it possible for scholars to choose between the quantity (representativeness) and the quality (accuracy and richness) of the data depending on the goals of their research. For both types of corpora, the challenges of their XML-TEI encoding related to the tools of their processing and analyzing are considered. Many methodological problems which arise from creating and processing medieval text corpora also concern other types of linguistic corpora.