Wednesday, October 2, 2019



Marco Manuscript Workshop 2020 – “The Ends of Manuscripts”

January 31-February 1, 2020
Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The fifteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday,
January 31, and Saturday, February 1, 2020, 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.

For this year’s workshop, as a tribute to the 2020 McClung Museum
exhibition “Visions of the End 1000-1600” (opening January 23), we
propose the theme “The Ends of Manuscripts.” We encourage everyone to
take this theme in the broadest possible sense; we invite submissions
that consider the “ends” of manuscripts – whether their physical
boundaries (colophons and explicits, incomplete texts, extrapolated
texts, lost or added leaves, booklets and bindings), their purposes
(texts written for particular patrons or communities, texts written
for devotional or polemical ends, texts written as responses to other
texts, texts prepared for or directed at someone or something), their
fates (where texts have ended up, in libraries or private collections,
in bindings or trash bins, framed on walls or preserved in digital
repositories), or their early coexistence with and gradual replacement
by printed books. Like detectives at a crime scene, we often must work
backward from the “ends” of a manuscript to its life and origins; in
these origins there may even lie some intimations of the manuscript’s
future demise. We welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic,
broadly imagined.

The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field
who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy.
Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project;
participants will be asked to 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 both
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 manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and
new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript
texts. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their
participation.

The deadline for applications is November 2, 2019. Applicants are
asked to submit a current CV and a two-page letter describing their
project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to
rliuzza@utk.edurliuzza@utk.edu
>, or by mail to the Department
of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN
37996-0430.

The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who do
not wish to present their own work but 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
Roy Liuzza or the Marco Institute at
marco@utk.edumarco@utk.edu> for more information.

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