Fourth Marco Manuscript Workshop

The Fourth Marco Manuscript Workshop, "Unruly Letters & Unbound
Texts," will be held Friday and Saturday, February 5 and 6, 2010, at
the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; the workshop is organized
by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza
(English). 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.

Last year’s workshop focused on “textual trauma”—instances of
violence, deliberate or otherwise, against texts. This year our focus
will be on texts and manuscripts that cross or confound the
boundaries scholars have tried to place on them, that do not fit
neatly into the genres or categories of modern scholarship, or that
pose peculiar difficulties of definition, categorization or reading.
These might include: macaronic and multilingual texts, prosi-metric
and metri-prosaic texts, glosses and commentaries, diagrams and
tables, ciphers and strange alphabets, incongruous or appropriated
forms and textual designs, interpolations and conflations, marginal
commentaries that overwhelm their texts, miscellanies and composite
manuscripts, and manuscripts in the age of print.

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. You may download a
registration form (in .pdf format) with more information at
, or contact Roy
M. Liuzza, Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301
McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430, email .

The following scholars will present their work:

Rebecca Brackmann (Lincoln Memorial University): “William Lambarde’s
marginal notes in his copy of Epitome Adagiorum de s. Erasmi”

Noah Gardiner (University of Michigan): “Mamluk-era Manuscripts on
Magic Attributed to the Egyptian Sufi Abu al-‘Abbas Ahmad”

Dorothy Kim (Vassar College): “Musical Notation, Funny Letters, and
Acoustic Alterity in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean 123
(Nuneaton Book)”

Victoria Morse (Carleton College): “Preaching to the Eyes: Opicino de
Canistris and Christian Reform in the Fourteenth Century”

Aaron Pelttari (Cornell University): “Restoring Ambiguity to the
Script of Ausonius of Bordeaux’s Ep. 6”

Michael Penn (Mount Holyoke): “How to Tell a Heretic When You Read
One: Interventions in Syriac MSS”

Helene Scheck (University of Albany): “Glosses and Readers’ Marks in
Halle Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Quedlinburg Codex 74 —
Reading in Female Monastic Communities”

David Townsend (University of Toronto) & Maura Lafferty (University
of Tennessee): “Navigating Ambiguity: Interpretive Foreclosure and
Paratext in Manuscripts of Walter of Chatillon’s Alexandreis”