The twentieth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday, January 31, and Saturday, February 1, 2025, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The workshop is organized by Professor Roy M. Liuzza (English) with R. D. Perry (English) and Charles Kuper (Classics) and is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

This year’s workshop explores the idea of “crossing borders,” particularly the borders between languages. We don’t always appreciate the extent to which premodern culture was multilingual – in medieval Europe, for example, Latin as a prestige language mingled with vernaculars such as English, French, Scandinavian, Irish, Welsh, and other languages. One might read in one language but speak in another, or speak in one but write in another; a household or community might have speakers of three or more languages interacting in various ways up and down the social scale. How is this multilingualism visible in surviving manuscripts? How, when, and why do manuscripts cross the boundaries between languages? Examples might include bilingual and trilingual manuscripts, macaronic texts, glosses and glossaries, evidence of script hierarchies and visual organization by language, notes and additions in different languages, translations and appropriations, and heterogeneous manuscripts compiled from different texts in different languages. What can these multilingual manuscripts tell us about how language diversity was negotiated in the premodern world? As always, we welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined, or on any other aspect of manuscripts, epigraphy, and the history of writing.

The workshop is open to scholars and students in any field who are engaged in manuscript studies, textual editing, or epigraphy. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more like a class than a conference; participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together towards developing better professional skills for textual and codicological work. We particularly invite the presentation of works in progress, unusual problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their participation.