It turns out that <textDesc> will absolutely not do for the document type, so I'm now looking at using an @rend attribute on the <fileDesc> element; that seems appropriate, given that the distinction is primarily being made for the purposes of rendering the output.

Lots more back and forth on this through TEI-L, along with discussion of how to handle forenames. I also marked up a large block of the bibliography for the first article, and sent a query over to the editors about one item.