Christopher Baswell (Barnard College and Columbia University), The Medieval Manuscript in Time. Co-sponsored by the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies and Houghton Library. Space in this hands-on workshop is limited; please click here to register.

No book is ever finished. Manuscript books especially may be left not quite copied for lack of an exemplar; or spaces may be left for decoration that is filled only later, or never. A book may have a brief period of suspension after a final step of binding, but the moment it is opened, it begins to transform. Users annotate (or deface) the text, add their own sketches or marks of attention, rearrange the book for new uses, or provide new means of access with chapter lists or forms of indexing. In this workshop, we will look at manuscript books in Harvard’s collections, with special attention to their incompleteness and their evolution. We’ll look especially at works we’d now call literature and history, but also law, religious practice, and beyond.