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A manuscript’s many uses, both formal and informal, will be the topic of the eighth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop, February 1 and 2.

The workshop, Texts at Work, is hosted by UT’s Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and will be held in room 440 of the Haslam Business Building. The workshop is designed for scholars and students who engage in textual editing and manuscript studies, but is free and open to the public.

The workshop will focus on manuscripts as tools, including not only the original texts themselves but also the many notes, corrections, indices, and unrelated text written in the manuscript’s margins and blank pages.

While modern books are judged by how clean and pristine they are, with even minor defects consigning a book to the shredder or incinerator, that hasn’t always been the case. Many medieval and Renaissance manuscripts were designed to accommodate such after-the-fact additions as pronunciation guides, notes to the reader, etc., due to the frequent scarcity of writing materials and the occasional flashes of insight sparked by the text itself.

The workshop is designed for scholars and students who engage in textual editing and manuscript studies. The two-day event will unfold more as a class, with researchers presenting their own works in progress, sharing theoretical insights and practical advice, and discussing new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts.

The workshop is sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies with support from the Hodges Better English Fund, the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, and the UT Knoxville Office of Research.

For more information on the workshop, visit the Marco Institute website.

C O N T A C T :

Vera Pantanizopoulos-Broux (865-974-1859, vpantani@utk.edu)

Charles Primm (865-974-5180, primmc@utk.edu)