This year’s Marco Manuscript Workshop explores the idea of “the whole book.” Most early texts do not appear on their own, but are copied with other texts, bundled and bound in groups, and put between covers with any number of related and unrelated works. Even after a book is made it can be added to, subtracted from, edited, emended, annotated, censored, damaged, or broken up into smaller books. As modern readers, our usual impulse is to try to restore a text to some pristine original state fresh from the author’s pen, which often means ignoring or stripping away the layers of history to be found in the surviving copies of the text. But the manuscript, however far removed it may be from the author, is always the most immediate context of a work; what can it tell us about the work’s origins, its history, and its meaning to the people who made it, read it, and copied it?

The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. Individual sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more like a class than a conference; 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.