Marco Manuscript Workshop

14th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop

“Bits and Pieces”

February 1-2, 2019

 

Call for Papers

The fourteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday and Saturday, February 1-2, 2019, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The workshop is organized by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English), and is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, with support from the Department of English and the Office of Research.

For this year’s workshop, we invite papers on the theme “Bits and Pieces.” Some manuscripts have survived the centuries bright, pristine, majestic, and complete; most have suffered at least some minor damage or loss; some manuscripts, however, seem no more than ragged scraps. They lack beginnings, or endings, or middles; they tantalize with their incompleteness. These fragments still have much to tell us, though they might make us work to learn it. The reader of manuscript fragments faces a broad array of problems – how to extrapolate missing text, how to fill the gaps in a page or a text, how to read a faded and worn leaf, how to combine separated fragments into a whole, how to represent the fragment in a modern edition in a way that renders it legible while still acknowledging its brokenness. Some fragments are already repaired, either bound into florilegia, rewritten by a well-meaning early reader, or patched and glued and restored in ways that sometimes obscure as much as they preserve; in such cases the modern reader may have to deconstruct an earlier reader’s traces before reconstructing the original text. The problems and rewards of studying manuscript fragments, large and small, are many; we welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined.

The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, 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 both 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 manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their participation.

The deadline for applications is November 2, 2018. Applicants are asked to submit a current CV and a two-page letter describing their project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to rliuzza@utk.edu, or by mail to the Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430.

 

Additional Information:

The workshop is open at no cost to anyone interested in sharing a lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies. Further details will be available later in the year. Please contact Roy Liuzza or the Marco Institute for more information.

 

---

Past Manuscript Workshops