2017 M-MLA Call for Papers
March 14, 2017 in Conference, Conference Announcement, M-MLA, Manuscript Studies
Call for Papers
“Artists, Activists, and Manuscript Evidence”
2017 Theme for the
Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
Permanent Panels
at the
Midwest Modern Language Association
2017 Convention
Cincinnati, Ohio
November 9-12, 2017
[Update: At our recent Open Business Meeting (see our 2017 International Congress on Medieval Studies Report), the organizer of these panels reported that the deadline for proposals for papers has been extended to 1 June. Please send your proposals to Justin Hastings, as described below. We hope to see you at the panels.]
The Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, in keeping with the 2017 M-MLA Convention’s theme of “Artists and Activists,” is sponsoring panels on manuscripts and printed books and the illuminators, scribes, editors, and other artists who created them and the scholars and readers who used them. The session invites all approaches, including textual, art historical, codicological, and paleographical.
Possible foci include but are by no means limited to:
- Scriveners, the Book Trade, and Early Modern Printed Editions
- Textual Transmission and Reception: Inscribing Alterity and Change
- On the Margins: Glosses, Illustrations, and Illuminations
Interested panelists should send brief abstracts of no more than 300 words to the organizer by 5 April 2017:
Justin Hastings
Department of English
Loyola University Chicago
Chicago, Illinois 60626
jhastings@luc.edu .
*****
A New Tradition
For information about the Events of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, to which these Sponsored Panels belong, please see our Events and Events Archive. For convenience, we distinguish between these Events elsewhere and our many Congress Activities over the years at the Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies, likewise with a Congress Archive, held at Western Michigan University each May in Kalamazoo.
Our Associate, Justin Hastings, generously offered to organize panels for the 2016 M-MLA Convention to be sponsored by the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence. The Call for Papers yielded not one, but two panels, with contributions spanning a wide range of materials, texts, periods, and regions. These sponsored panels represented the first time, apart from the Kalamazoo Congress, that the Research Group sponsored meetings within an existing conference held in North America, although we have co-organized and co-sponsored Events afresh in various centers in North America and elsewhere, as described in the Events Archive.
The plan to sponsor the 2017 Panels follows our first appearance as a Sponsor at the 2016 M-MLA Convention — with 2 Panels on Marginalia in Manuscripts and Books in response to the Call for Papers for 1 Panel alone. See the 2016 M-MLA Report for these Panels, with the published Abstracts of the Papers and a view of the Posters.
The continuation of the tradition of Permanent Panels at the M-MLA Convention is most welcome, and we thank our organizer, Justin Hastings, and the Midwest Modern Language Association. We congratulate Justin for his expert organizational skills and outstanding collegiality, and we applaud his willingness to continue to organize the panels for the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence.
Further information about the Convention can be found in the 2017 M-MLA Convention Permanent Section Call for Papers .
Another First
This year, responding gladly to Justin’s initiative, we issue a Poster for the Call for Papers.

As customary, the design of the Poster corresponds with the Research Group’s Style Manifesto, and employs our very own copyright font Bembino — available freely for download, along with the booklet describing its reasons and range. (Tip: The next version of Bembino is advancing toward its launch very soon, in the next few weeks! Update: It is now available! See Bembino .)
Up to now, our Posters in recent years have accompanied our Congress Activities and Symposia, Colloquia, Workshops, and the like. Circulated at those events or activities, the Posters now illustrate the Pages or Posts devoted to them on our website. Also, a Gallery illustrates the sequence of our Posters on Display. They exemplify aspects of our multiple Layout Designs, which have a Gallery as well.
Sometimes, we issued a Poster for the Save-the-Date Announcement of an approaching Symposium. Those specimens likewise appear in the Poster Gallery. However, this is the first time for a Poster for the Call for Papers. Nice!
Thank you, Justin.
Join the Event
Remember, please send your proposals by April 5th to Justin:
jhastings@luc.edu .
Many subjects and approaches may suit the themes of
“Artists, Activists, and Manuscript Evidence”
What do you think?
You might Contact Us and visit our FaceBook Page for further conversations.
*****
Update: Following the Call for Papers, we now announce the program. Please see the plan for our 2017 M-MLA Panel.


















A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues Reused for Euthymius
December 24, 2016 in Manuscript Studies, Photographic Exhibition, Uncategorized
A Leaf from Gregory’s Dialogues
Reused for Binding
A Copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus’s On the Psalms
Budny Handlist 3
In our blog on Manuscript Studies (see its Contents List), Mildred Budny (see Her Page) continues to report the results of research for her Illustrated Handlist.
Here, we focus upon a leaf plucked from its 12th-century manuscript and pressed into service, with trimmed edges and mitered folds, as the vellum covering for a binding for a different text of small format. Both texts, primary and secondary in the life of the leaf, concern religious subjects, but they emanate from authors of different dates, locations, and languages in the Latin West and the Orthodox East respectively. The primary text represents a remnant of a text and an author familiar in some other blogposts, which consider the Dialogues, the Sermons or Homilies, and other texts by Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 to 694 CE).
Handlist 3, Recto
Handlist 3, Verso
Part of Gregory’s Dialogues, Book III, Chapter 7
(on Andreas, Bishop of Fondi/Fundi):
Sections 2 (Hic namque uenerabilis uir) –
8 (uel quae in conuentu)
Present measurements:
Circa 357 × 237 mm
< written area circa 266 × 133 mm >
Single column of 28 lines
in revived Caroline minuscule
without embellishments
Germany, circa 1175
Reused for some time as the vellum cover for the binding of a copy of
Euthymius Zigabenus‘s Commentary on the Psalms
in Greek or in Latin translation?
(now lost or preserved elsewhere in a location unknown)
For this secondary use, the remnants of a set of titles on the outside of the spine of the cover (the original verso of the reused leaf) remain in place, albeit abraded and fragmented, as both a pasted, inscribed paper label (orientated along the ‘horizontal’ across the spine) and an ink inscription on the reused leaf itself in Capitals (‘vertical’, with the tops of those letters turned toward the ‘front cover’). Another, smaller and fragmentary pasted label with a broad rectangular border stands near the bottom of the broad spine of the cover and partly overlies the ‘vertical’ spine inscription.
Acquired, probably by purchase (according to the Owner’s recollections), in France in the past 15 years or so, but before 2007 when I first saw and began to photograph the leaf. This item and others in the Illustrated Handlist acquired in France at various times and by various means (purchase, gift, or exchange), came from a single source in the Département of Saône-et-Loire, from about 1999 onward. Because the leaf does not carry indications of its original place and time of production, apart from its materials, layout, design, script, orthography, and punctuation, those unknowns must depend upon evaluations of the style of the script, lacking any forms of embellishment, such as decorated initials, which might have provided possibly more closely datable symptoms than the letters “alone”.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: 'Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts', Binding History, Bishop Andrew of Fundi, Budny's Illustrated Catalogue, Ege Manuscript 41, Euthymius Zigabenos, Fondi, Gregory the Great, Gregory's Dialogues, manuscript fragments, Manuscript Fragments Reused in Bindings, Manuscript studies, Psalter Commentary, Saki, Temple of Apollo
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