Call for contributions to proposed sessions for the International Medieval Congress (IMC) 2027 in Leeds.

Unlike the books we own today, medieval manuscripts were rarely meant for a single user. They served communities, were passed on to new owners, and served generations of readers. Historical events propelled them far from their place of origin while enterprising annotators expanded their original context of use. Whenever they changed hands, new possibilities for reception, reappropriation and reinterpretation of their contents emerged. A codex crossing linguistic boundaries invites translation, a manuscript rediscovered after centuries revitalises a rare work, a codicological unit rebound alters how — and by whom — it is read. These journeys sometimes left visible traces — marginal annotations, evidence of rebinding, layers of correction. Just as often, though, the movement of a manuscript and its consequences for the text it carries can only be reconstructed indirectly, through the combined evidence of philology, palaeography, and codicology. The  sessions proposed by the PhysioLab and MsPhys projects aim to investigate how these material journeys of medieval manuscripts — their movements and transformations — affect the textual traditions they transmit, and ask what such traces can teach us about the nature of textual transmission and reception.

Examples of topics relevant to the proposed  sessions include:

• Manuscripts bearing marks of long use or use by varied communities
• Reconstruction of reading communities through marginal annotations
• Evidence of selection processes in or between manuscripts
• Communities and their manuscript production
• Greek and oriental manuscripts circulating in the West
• Accessing intention and context of use via analysis of the rewriting of texts
• Methods (including digital) to investigate the connections between manuscripts
• Ways to improve the description of manuscripts to reconstruct their journey

The sessions aim to bring together scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, whether philology and languages, palaeography and codicology, history or computational methods, to operationalise the potential of medieval manuscripts as sources for the history of texts.

The sessions, titled « Wandering manuscripts: Shaping communities and connecting texts », explore the role of medieval manuscripts as witnesses to communities of readers, scholars, and users. We are interested in analyses of the visible traces of readership, long use, and changing context in the codex, but equally in the methodological considerations involved in the reconstruction of medieval manuscripts’ movements and their impact.

The sessions are co-organised by two ongoing research projects, PhysioLab (IRHT-CSMC) and MsPhys (Radboud). Please find a draft of the proposal below. If you are interested in joining, please send an abstract of 100 words and a short CV (including email and postal address, telephone number, and full affiliation details (department, institution)) to shari.boodts@ru.nl, emmanuelle.kuhry@irht.cnrs.fr, and caroline.mace@uni-hamburg.de by 10 September 2026. Acceptance will be communicated by 20 September and the session submitted to the IMC by 30 September.