Call for Papers: International Medieval Congress
Leeds, 10th-13th July, 2006
Special Thematic Strand: Emotion and Gesture

Proposals are invited for the following session:

Text Formatting as Written Gesture in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts

Text formatting features such as punctuation, spacing, capitalisation, decoration and line-ends function in the creation of meaning as part of a semiotic system (writing) and are analogous to the non-linguistic contributors to meaning in speech such as pause, intonation, loudness and gesture, but are often viewed as only incidental features of the written medium. An understanding of the significance of formatting features for those who produced and used medieval manuscripts has been hampered by a prevailing assumption that text formatting was arbitrarily determined through a combination of the physical practicalities of book production, the idiosyncratic preferences of scribes, and the formal conventions of individual scriptoria. In addition, the study of medieval texts through printed editions most often precludes and at best inhibits the study of the interplay between a text and its formatting features. Papers on individual Old English texts and manuscripts or papers wh!
 ich focus on a single formatting feature across a range of texts and manuscripts are welcomed.

Please send proposals to Victoria Bristow at aexvlb_at_nottingham.ac.uk by 28th September 2005.

Victoria Bristow
Postgraduate Teaching Fellow
University of Nottingham
www.nottingham.ac.uk/~aexvlb

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Received on Sun Sep 18 2005 - 12:30:44 EDT