Monday, July 9, 2018

Marco Manuscript Workshop 2019: “Bits and Pieces”
February 1-2, 2019
Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Fourteenth Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday and
Saturday, February 1-2, 2019, 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, we invite papers on the theme “Bits and
Pieces.” Some manuscripts have survived the centuries bright,
pristine, majestic, and complete; most have suffered at least some
minor damage or loss; some manuscripts, however, seem no more than
ragged scraps. They lack beginnings, or endings, or middles; they
tantalize with their incompleteness. These fragments still have much
to tell us, though they make us work to learn it. The reader of
incomplete manuscripts and fragments faces a broad array of problems –
how to extrapolate missing text, how to fill the gaps in a page or a
text, how to read a faded and worn leaf, how to combine dispersed
fragments into a whole, how to represent the fragment in a modern
edition in a way that renders it legible while still acknowledging its
brokenness. Some fragments are already repaired, either bound into
florilegia, rewritten by a well-meaning early reader, or patched and
glued and restored in ways that sometimes obscure as much as they
preserve; in such cases the modern reader may have to deconstruct an
earlier reader’s traces before reconstructing the original text. The
problems and rewards of studying manuscript fragments, large and
small, are many; 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, 2018. 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.



Roy M. Liuzza
Department of English
University of Tennessee
301 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Ph 865-974-6939
Fax 502-415-7477

No comments: