How should I let my reader know that I have used modern spelling for quotations from a work written in the early modern period?

Note: This post relates to content in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. For up-to-date guidance, see the ninth edition of the MLA Handbook.

If you use modern spelling in quotations from a work written in the early modern period, you should let your readers know in a note how you are changing the original spelling. For example, a recent issue of PMLA contained the following note: “Throughout, I regularize early modern spelling for u and v, I and j” (Bearden 47n16).

Work Cited

Bearden, Elizabeth B. “Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond.” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 33–50.