19th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop
“The Whole Book”
February 2-3, 2024
The nineteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday, February 2, and Saturday, February 3, 2024, in person at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The workshop is organized by Professor Roy M. Liuzza (English) and Dr. Caitlin Branum Thrash and is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
This year’s Marco Manuscript Workshop explores the idea of “the whole book.” Most early texts do not appear on their own, but are copied with other texts, bundled and bound in groups, and put between covers with any number of related and unrelated works. Even after a book is made it can be added to, subtracted from, edited, emended, annotated, censored, damaged, or broken up into smaller books. As modern readers, our usual impulse is to try to restore a text to some pristine original state fresh from the author’s pen, which often means ignoring or stripping away the layers of history to be found in the surviving copies of the text. But the manuscript, however far removed it may be from the author, is always the most immediate context of a work; what can it tell us about the work’s origins, its history, and its meaning to the people who made it, read it, and copied it?
The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. Individual sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will 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.
2024 Workshop Schedule and Information
All workshop events take place in the West Wing (3rd Floor) of the Haslam Business Building, on the campus of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Friday, February 2, 2024
8:30am Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00am Welcome and Opening Remarks Anne-Helene Miller (Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute) and Roy Liuzza (English)
9:15am Alicia Smith (Parker Library, Cambridge) “The Harlot Saint Thais in the Composite Book: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 385, as Case Study”
10:30am Coffee Break
10:45am Natalie Grinnell (Wofford College) “Interpreting the Oxford Bodley Rawlinson 82D”
12:00pm Lunch Break
1:30pm Kira Robison (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga) “Coloring in the Anatomy: Marginalia and Johann Peyligk’s Sixteenth-Century Compendiosa”
2:45pm Coffee Break
3:00pm Jo Koster (Winthrop University) “Deliberately Disembodied: Understanding the Manuscript Context of Otto Ege’s Broken ‘Cambridge’ Bible”
6:30pm Workshop Dinner
Saturday, February 3, 2024
9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:15am Austin Benson (University of Virginia) “Trilingual Manuscripts in Post-Conquest Britain, ca. 1160–1340”
10:30am Coffee Break
10:45am Janet Ericksen (University of Minnesota, Morris) “Books and Readers of Juvencus and the Distichs”
12:00pm Lunch Break
1:30pm Katherine Walter (SUNY Brockport) “Luxurious Ministries: Bishops, Miniatures, and Margins in Later Medieval Liturgical Books”
2:45pm Coffee Break
3:00pm Sarah McNamer (Georgetown University) “Play, Power, and Politics in Bodley 264”
4:15pm Concluding Remarks and Discussion Deborah Grady (University of Virginia)