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2014 Marco Manuscript Workshop

9th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop
“Textual Communities”
January 31-February 1, 2014

The Ninth Marco Manuscript Workshop will be held Friday and Saturday, January 31 – February 1, 2014, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; the workshop is organized by Professor Roy M. Liuzza (English).

The theme of the 2014 workshop is “Textual Communities.” In his 1983 book The Implications of Literacy, Brian Stock argued that “what was essential to a textual community was not a written version of a text, although that was sometimes present, but an individual, who having mastered it, then utilized it for reforming a group’s thought and action‎.” This year’s workshop takes Stock’s influential arguments back to the material evidence: can our knowledge of textual communities help us understand manuscript evidence? What physical signs reveal the presence or activity of communities of readers and interpreters? What traces do these communities leave in the textual and codicological record? How can we read manuscript evidence — glosses, alterations, translations, compilations, commentaries, libraries, and so on — for signs of the living communities who made, read, and used these books?

The following scholars will present their work:

  • Deann Armstrong (Vanderbilt U): “Dr. Donne’s Commonplace Mistresses: Towards a Digital Edition of Two Anonymous 1640s Manuscript Miscellany Epigrams”
  • Abigail Firey (U of Kentucky): “Cloisters, Communities, and Canonists: Common Interpretations and Content in Carolingian Canon Law Codices”
  • Christina Fitzgerald (U of Toledo): “Copying Couplets: Circulating Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry”
  • Rachel Gibson (U of Minnesota – Twin Cities): “Marciana Manuscript Fr. V 10: Cultural Translation and the Franco-Italian Gui de Nanteuil.”
  • Mary Kate Hurley (Ohio University): “Translation Effects in Cambridge, University Library Ii.I.33”
  • Michael Johnston (Purdue U), with the virtual participation of Carrie Griffin (Bristol U): “Codicological Recipes and Communities of Textual Production in Late Medieval England”
  • Jennifer Clare Woods (Duke U): “Putting Manuscripts on the Map: Reconstructing Early Medieval Intellectual Networks”

The workshop is open to scholars and students at any level who may be interested in learning more about textual scholarship through this informal discussion of practical examples. All workshop events, including lunches on Friday and Saturday and a dinner on Friday night, are free, but registration is required. Presentations will take place in the Great Room of the UT International House.

Please contact Roy M. Liuzza, Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430, email rliuzza@utk.edu.

The workshop is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and is supported by the Humanities Center and the Office of Research at the University of Tennessee.