The fourteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday and Saturday, February 1-2, 2019, in the Great Room of the International House 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, with support from the Department of English and the Office of Research.

This year’s workshop explores 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 might make us work to learn it. The reader of manuscript 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 separated 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 workshop is open to scholars and students in any field who are interested in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. For a detailed schedule of individual sessions, see our website.