The Eighth Marco Manuscript Workshop will be held Friday and Saturday, February 1 and 2, 2013, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; the workshop is organized by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English).

This year’s workshop focuses on practical manuscripts, or manuscripts as tools – classroom texts, collections of memoranda, recipes, or formulae, miscellanies, corrected or annotated texts, dog-eared and interleaved manuscripts, indices, running headings, and other signs of everyday use. We hope to explore new and old ways of interpreting such evidence, of reconstructing original contexts, and of imagining the relationship between reference and practice that such well-used books represent. What do the physical traces in books tell us about the people who used the books? Can we discern a history of pragmatic readers, builders, makers, and practitioners parallel to the history of the authors who write texts and scribes who create manuscripts? How do we read a manuscript as a living book with a busy life?

The following scholars will present their work:

Elizabeth Archibald (John Hopkins University) “Liber magistri: Text and Manuscript in Carolingian Classrooms”

W. Martin Bloomer (Notre Dame University) “Modeling reading: The commentary tradition on the use and abuse of the Distichs of Cato”

Kate Fedewa (University of Wisconsin) “School Work: Deciphering the Teacher, Student, and Text in Yale, Beinecke Library MS 3 (34)”

Matthew Giancarlo (University of Kentucky) “The Manuscripts of Peter Idley’s Works at Work, c. 1450”

Holly Johnson (Mississippi State University) “The Making of a ‘Model’ Sermon Collection: Robert Rypon and His Scribes and Readers.”

Karen Jolly (University of Hawai’i, Manoa) “Representing Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19”

Clara Pascual-Argente (Rhodes College) “Nota exempla antiqua: Life at the Margins of Manuscript BNM 3666”

Sarah Zeiser (Harvard University) “A Tradition in Transition: British Library, Cotton MS Faustina C.I., Part II and Welsh Manuscript Production at the Turn of the Twelfth Century”

The workshop is open to scholars and students at any level who may be interested in learning more about textual scholarship through this informal discussion of practical examples. All workshop events, including lunches on Friday and Saturday and a reception on Friday night, are free, but registration is required; dinner on Friday evening is available for an additional charge. Please visit http://web.utk.edu/~marco for more information, or contact Roy M. Liuzza, Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430, email rliuzza@utk.edu.

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