Session #1:
“Mother and Other Tongues: Choices, Conflicts, Resistances”
This session is concerned with linguistic options medieval authors or scribes may have had with respect to choosing their language of expression, vis-à-vis in particular, but not limited to, the usage of the mother tongue. The growing use of vernacular languages towards the end of the Middle Ages became a source of reflection, sometimes explicitly, regarding their status, forms, spheres of usage or one’s sense of belonging and identity. The choices that were made could have political, cultural, intellectual, territorial, gendered, or religious implications. We welcome papers that address any of these issues including aspects of language shifting or language contact phenomena, territorialization, diglossy, as well as discussions of linguistic minorities, or surprising/questionable linguistic choices made by authors in particular contexts. Approaches could include subjects of conflicts, structures of domination, or resistance to any form of cultural linguistic imposition.
Session #2:
“Celebrating Ten Years of the Marco Manuscript Workshop: Mind the Gaps”
For the last ten years, the Marco Institute has sponsored its Manuscript Workshop, an annual gathering of scholars sharing their work on manuscripts and codicology in an informal collaborative setting. The guiding principle behind this program has been that scholars of all levels can better work through the thorny issues of textual scholarship with an engaged scholarly community, which can also open up new avenues of research for projects in development. The Marco-sponsored session “Mind the Gaps” will focus on understanding how readers interact with the physical layout of the page, script choice, or text-image interaction. “Mind the gaps” is open to papers covering topics like erasures, marginalia, missing portions, possible cases of censorship, or the disassembly and rebinding of manuscripts in the early modern period.
Please send one-page proposals to Mary Dzon (mdzon@utk.edu) by Sept. 15.
