13th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop: “Transmission”

February 2-3, 2018

The thirteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday and Saturday, February 2-3, 2018, 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.

This year’s workshop explores the idea of “Transmission.” Few texts are preserved in their author’s own hand; most surviving manuscripts are copies of copies, each hand-made, and each differing to a greater or lesser degree, by design or accident, from the copy before it. The more successful or important or popular a work, the more copies were produced, and the more difference and variation exists among the surviving copies; but even a work that survives in only one copy may represent the end of a series, potentially a long one, of moments of textual reproduction. Texts may travel in groups or be tucked into solitary margins; they may gather in closely-knit families or diverge in significant and sometimes strange ways. Whatever hidden chances may have led to their survival, every manuscript has a story to tell about its origins, its readers, and its place as a link in the chain of transmission. How do we reconstruct these stories? Do the traditional tools of textual criticism reflect the reality of textual transmissions? What can a text tell us about its own history?

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.

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

Program

Sessions will be held in the Great Room of the UT International House

Friday, February 2

8:30 am	Registration
9:00	Opening remarks & welcome by Marco Riggsby Director Jay Rubenstein
9:15	Julia Marvin (University of Notre Dame) – “When History Begins Twice: Apparatus and the Generation of Meaning in the Brut Historiographic Tradition”
10:30	Coffee break
10:45	Kathryn A. Lowe (University of Glasgow) – “Textual Transmission and the Development of the Documentary Archive”
12:00	Poster presentations by UTK graduate students
12:30 pm	Lunch – Black Cultural Center, room 102/103/104
2:00	Leslie Lockett (The Ohio State University) – “The Transmission, Study, and Translation of Augustine’s Soliloquia in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries”
3:15	Coffee break
3:30	Martin Foys (University of Wisconsin, Madison) – “The Translation and Transformation of Carolingian Texts in Anglo-Saxon England: CCCC 44 and Cotton Vespasian D.xv”
6:00	Reception (cash bar) – Copper Cellar Restaurant, 1807 Cumberland Ave. (space limited – rsvp to marco@utk.edu)
7:00	Dinner – Copper Cellar Restaurant (space limited – rsvp to marco@utk.edu)

Saturday, February 3

9:30 am	Sarah Sprouse (Texas Tech University) – “Fantasies of Wales: Some Paleographic Evidence for the Mediating Role of Gerald of Wales”
10:45	Coffee break
11:00	Andrew Dunning (University of Toronto) – “When is an author a manuscript’s corrector?”
12:30 pm	Lunch – International House Community Room
2:00	Scott Bruce (University of Colorado, Boulder) – “The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition”
3:15	Coffee break
3:30	Patrick Naeve (Cornell University) – “Geography and Genealogy in an Arabic Glossed Manuscript of Isidore’s Etymologiae”
	(dinner open)

The Manuscript Workshop is co-sponsored by the Marco Institute, the Department of English, and the Office of Research.