The Marco Manuscript Workshop, now in its 20th year, is one of the Marco Institute’s premier annual events. Originally founded by Roy Liuzza (English), the Workshop brings together eight scholars every year for a two-day program exploring a theme or topic within manuscript studies. Participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together towards developing better professional skills for textual and codicological work.

This year’s workshop explores the idea of “crossing borders,” particularly the borders between languages. We don’t always appreciate the extent to which premodern culture was multilingual – in medieval Europe, for example, Latin as a prestige language mingled with vernaculars such as English, French, Scandinavian, Irish, Welsh, and other languages. One might read in one language but speak in another, or speak in one but write in another; a household or community might have speakers of three or more languages interacting in various ways up and down the social scale. How is this multilingualism visible in surviving manuscripts? How, when, and why do manuscripts cross the boundaries between languages? Examples might include bilingual and trilingual manuscripts, macaronic texts, glosses and glossaries, evidence of script hierarchies and visual organization by language, notes and additions in different languages, translations and appropriations, and heterogeneous manuscripts compiled from different texts in different languages. What can these multilingual manuscripts tell us about how language diversity was negotiated in the premodern world?