Border States:
Marginalia in North American Manuscripts and Printed Books

Two Panels
Sponsored by the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence
and Organized by Justin Hastings
(Department of English, Loyola University Chicago)

at the Convention of the Midwest Modern Language Association (M-MLA)
to be held on 10-13 November 2016 at St. Louis, Missouri

[Posted on 10 May 2016, with updates. A further update appears in the 2016 M-MLA Report.]

Invitation Letter, Plus Marginalia, for ‘Marginalia in Manuscripts’, 24 June 1994

The Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, in keeping with the M-MLA conference’s theme of “Border States,” announces the following pair of Special Session Panels examining materials in North American collections.  The responses to the Call for Papers for our sponsored Special Session yielded two panels rather than one, and extend their scope both temporally and geographically.

The subjects, and their extended range, accord well with the Research Group’s long-term interest in the physical characteristics of books, their modes of production, and their processes of use across time. The subject of “Marginalia in Manuscripts” formed the focus of one of the Seminars on “The Evidence of Manuscripts” in our early years based in the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College.  Our blog on “Manuscript Studies” — plus some printed books — includes reports of discoveries grounded in close analysis of their surfaces, marginalia often included. Do we practice what we preach?  Well, we prefer to refrain from writing in books belonging to others, as we recommend to you, but our own pages?  That might be different.  Witness the Master Copy of the Invitation Letter to that Seminar (see here).  Marginalia Lives On!

For the 2016 Panels, we publish the Abstracts for the Papers in stages, starting now.  The publication of the Convention timetable allows us also to report the schedule for our Sessions.

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