The Medieval Latin Studies Group invites proposals for papers on the rhetoric of the page in Latin manuscripts of the Middle Ages for a panel to be held at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago in January 2014.

Medievalists have long known that the book as an object is an important witness to the society and culture for which it is made, a truth arrived at relatively recently by scholars of print books, such as Chartier and Genette. This panel will look at the manuscript page and how scribes, through the conscious or unconscious choices that they made about layout, script, decoration, and so forth, sought to shape the approach of readers to the text they were about to read. Scribes present different genres quite differently: a thirteenth-century copy of a scholastic summa and a copy of an epic from the same period look quite different, and this differing treatment demands a differing responses from the readers of each, even before they begin to read. Changes over time are equally telling: a fifth-century Vergil looks very different than a humanist Vergil. Those differences reflect very different understandings of and uses for his works in those periods. Welcome submissions would include close analyses of manuscripts of classical and/or medieval texts, as well as discussions of methodologies relevant for this area of inquiry.

One-page abstracts of papers requiring no more than 20 minutes to deliver should be submitted by April 4, 2013, preferably via email attachment to bmulliga@haverford.edu. Questions may be directed to Maura Lafferty (Department of Classics, University of Tennessee) at mlaffert@utk.edu. Membership in the Medieval Latin Studies Group is not required to submit an abstract.