MLA 2019 CFP
MLA 2019 Special Session CFP
"Telescoping Time and Textual Communities: Medieval Manuscripts and Their Early Modern Use[r]s"
The artificial boundary between the medieval and early modern periods as a heuristic facilitates periodization in scholarly study. However that inherent heuristic nature is forgotten and instead the boundary becomes an impenetrable wall and the study of a period becomes a myopic effort lacking the wider context afforded by the reality of history as a continuum. When that heuristic replaces reality, we as a community of scholars lose the invaluable insights of scholars working on other eras, effectively transforming the heuristic into a disability. Recent moves towards book history and digital humanities have opened up a new possible approach to breaking down the boundary -- assessment of readers as "users" of the book as a technology. Medieval and early modern readers alike used the manuscript, leaving behind a cacophony of voices in the margins, flyleaves, interlinear glosses, re-collations, and rebindings. The book as an object collects evidence of readers' practices over the centuries and stands to further complicate the already artificial boundary separating two supposedly distinct periods of time. This panel seeks papers that pursue the cacophony of voices in the book as an object in order to push the boundary back into its status as heuristic. Possible topics might include transmission, annotations, incunabula, re-collation efforts of antiquarians such as John Cotton, coterie communities, transatlantic sharing or copying practices, etc. Preference will be given to papers that are interdisciplinary or explore digital methodologies for analysis.
Please send abstracts of 200 words by March 20, 2018 to [email protected] and [email protected].
