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2015 Marco Manuscript Workshop

10th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop
“Mind the Gaps”
February 6-7, 2015

The 10th Marco Manuscript Workshop will be held Friday and Saturday, Feb. 6-7, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The workshop is organized this year by Professor Thomas Burman (History) and Ph.D. candidates Scott Bevill (English) and Teresa Hooper (English).

William Sherman closed his 2008 Used Books with the following question: “Are books from the past precious relics, in which marginalia are dirt or desecration, or are they inanimate objects (like pots or arrowheads) that are only brought to life by traces of the human hands and minds that used them?”  This year’s workshop seeks to address this question by highlighting not only studies of marginalia but also erasures, lacunae, palimpsests, and the transformative processes of rebinding and repurposing. After fires, water damage, rats, cats, early modern editors, contemporary censors, later bookbinders, and other disasters, sometimes we discover that we can learn much from what is missing from or added to a manuscript.  The life of these books may be discovered not through the text written on the page, but scribbled in the margins, erased between the lines, pasted within the bindings, glossed on the endpapers, or folded into the quires. What do we discover when we look in the gaps? How can we develop new ways to explore the rich textual interplay of imperfect manuscripts?

The following scholars will present their work in paired 75 minute sessions:

  • Karen Cook (University of Hartford) “An Unknown Theorist and his Fragmentary Treatise: Making Sense of Johannes Pipudi and De are cantus”
  • Anna Dysert (McGill University) “The Manuscripts of Isaac Israeli’s Diets in the Context of 12th Century Medicine”
  • Pamela Hammons (University of Miami) “Temporal, Formal, Material, and Aesthetic Gaps: Modernizing an Early Modern Widow’s Manuscript Verse”
  • Brandon Hawk (University of Tennessee – Knoxville) “Compiling Biblical Exegesis: Arras, Bibliotheque Municipale 764”
  • Britt Mize (Texas A&M University) “Scribe C and the Life of the N-Town Plays”
  • Sarah Noonan (Lindenwood University) “The Book in Parts: Selective Reading Practices in Late Medieval England”
  • Jennifer Anh-Thư Tran Smith (Pepperdine University) “Editing Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith“
  • Alison Walker (Saint Louis University) “Reading like a Girl: Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady and National Library of Wales, MS 21242C”

We are also excited to announce a special brown bag lunch roundtable featuring William Johnson, Anne Malcolm, and Max Stevenson of Ohio State University. They will each be discussing their projects on manuscripts from the OSU Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.

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 dinner on Friday night, are free, but registration is required. A registration form is available here under ‘Resources.’

The workshop is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and is supported by the Hodges Better English Fund and the Office of Research at the University of Tennessee.