The 21st annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place January 30–31, 2026, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The workshop is organized by Charles Kuper (Classics) and R. D. Perry (English) and is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

This year’s workshop explores the issues of “destruction and preservation.” As anyone working in the premodern period knows all too well, culture is fragile. It is beset by forces that would rather destroy it, sometimes intentionally, as when authorities make certain things verboten or seek to suppress them, or when changing attitudes in revolutionary moments call upon the present to attack the past. These forces, though, are sometimes unintentional, as when the natural processes of decay or the vagaries of history damage texts and artifacts as they make their way through time. Fortunately, we can meet these forces of destruction with acts of preservation, whether using new technologies to uncover what time has obscured, or simply by the act of reading and transcribing work anew. In this way, any work with a manuscript is an act of preservation. This workshop focuses on how we understand these acts of destruction and preservation. What tools or strategies can be brought to bear on damaged texts? How do we read around acts of destruction? What are the possibilities or limitations on our capacity to preserve these fragile cultural documents? Examples might include work with light-, animal-, or chemically-damaged books; how to handle intentional acts of destruction, like the removal of illuminations or cutting up manuscripts; texts that time has rendered illegible or fragmentary; technologies and strategies for recovering deliberate acts of erasure or unintended destruction; and efforts to identify fragmented materials and return them to their proper place. How can we read what history has tried to destroy? As always, we welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined, or on any other aspect of manuscripts, epigraphy, and the history of writing.

The workshop is open to scholars and students in any field (Art History, Classics, English, History, Languages, etc.) who are engaged in paleography and codicology or any other aspect of manuscript studies, textual editing, or epigraphy. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text(s) and context(s), 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. We particularly invite the presentation of works in progress, unusual problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their participation. This year, we’re pleased that Roy Liuzza, Professor Emeritus of Medieval Literature and co-founder of the Marco Manuscript Workshop, will serve as a respondent for all the papers.

The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who are interested in sharing a lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies. Further details will be available later in the year; please contact the Marco Institute at marco@utk.edu for more information.