Textual Trauma:
Violence Against Texts
The workshop is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, and is supported by the Hodges Better English Fund, the Humanities Initiative Committee, and the Office of Research at the University of Tennessee.

A Manuscript Workshop
February 6 & 7, 2009
Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville will host a two-day workshop on manuscript studies on February 6-7, 2009. The workshop is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and organized by Professors
Roy M. Liuzza (English) and Maura K. Lafferty (Classics). As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more a class than a conference; participants will be invited to share both their successes and frustrations, and work together
to develop better professional skills for textual and paleographical work.

This year’s workshop will explore acts of violence, deliberate or otherwise, against texts. Texts are inextricably bound to their material context, and material damage can have significant implications both for the reading of a text and for
our understanding of its reception and use. Aside from damage through accident or neglect, many manuscripts have erasures or corrections by contemporary or later scribes; words are deleted, names erased, text cancelled. Erasures and other deletions call attention to themselves, reminding the reader to remember to forget what has been altered or removed.

Damage and defacement may reveal just as much about reading practices, ownership (of individual books and of the meaning of the text itself), claims of authority, assertions of power, the circulation of texts, and the interactions of textual communities as more positive marks like glosses, annotations, and colophons. Some books fall apart from overuse; others are dismembered for scrap parchment; equally severe damage can result from a modern curator’s efforts to preserve or recover faded readings. Texts can also be violated in less physically damaging ways: rewritings can fundamentally alter the text's meaning, sections can be extracted and placed in new contexts, contradictory texts can be bound together, commentary that attacks or distorts the text can be copied alongside it, and so on. Arguably,
even modern printed critical editions impose this sort of violence on the texts they hope to preserve. How should we regard these many forms of violent engagement with texts? Is an act of textual violence always a violation, the destruction of a privileged original, a gap that must be repaired? Or can editors and readers learn to regard the violence itself as an element of the text's identity as a cultural and social construct? How can we read such violence to understand the later use, appropriation, or abuse of the text, and its new role(s) in a changing world?
All workshop events are open to scholars and students at any level who may be interested in learning more about textual studies through the informal presentation of practical examples. The cost of the workshop is $50 for faculty and $25 for graduate students; this fee includes the lunches on Friday and Saturday, and a reception on Friday evening.

Please visit www.utk.edu/~marco for registration forms and further information.

The following scholars will present:
Michelle Bolduc (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee): Textual Traumas and Manuscript Cultures: The Case of Newberry Library MS 158

Eddie Christie (Georgia State University): Writing-Violence and the MSS of the Old English Poetic Solomon and Saturn

Greti Dinkova-Bruun (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto): Manuscript BL Cotton Titus D.xx: A Medieval Reader?

Julian Hendrix (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): The St. Gall Ritual: A Cultural History of its Use and Abuse

John Johansen (University of Alberta): The Worcester Fragments

Shantanu Phukan (San Jose State University): Readerly Responses and Textual Trauma: Persian Scribes and the Hindi Romance

Jay Rubenstein (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Liber floridus: Searching for Consistent Vision in a Mangled and Incomplete Book

Kip Wheeler (Carson-Newman College): Virtual Reconstruction of Fragmented Manuscripts
Textual Trauma: Violence Against Texts

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