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.
