For a study of Renaissance punctuation, one might well begin with the
entry by Fred Nichols on Punctuation in the now forgotten Spenser
Encyclopedia. In his brief bibliography, he cites three studies. Bert
At 02:11 PM 30/09/2006, you wrote:
>I know that the late Fred Nichols was an authority on 16th century
>punctuation as well as on Neolatin, but I'm not sure if he wrote much. I
>once asked him about the comma after "perfecte paterne of a Poete" (so
>often misread by my students as meaning a pattern of a perfect poet)--the
>sentence would make better sense to me if that's an early modern comma, or
>in other words one that indicates a nanosecond of breathing and not a
>syntactic pause of the sort we would make. Elizabethans would use commas
>where we wouldn't. In this case, the sense would be "a perfect pattern of
>a poet who's pissed off because he isn't getting funded." Fred said he
>thought I might have a point in not having a comma, so to speak, but
>didn't direct me to anything he had written. Anne.
>
> > I don't know of such a study, but I know a little about possible
> > sources for it. The TCP transcriptions of EEBO let you, if you are so
> > inclined, find out about the punctuation habits of particular texts.
> > I read somewhere that Sidney was inordinately fond of parentheses in
> > the Arcadia and wondered what facts this was based on. I happen to
> > have a lot of those texts in a database environment and ran a test on
> > the Arcadia. It turns out that the Arcadia is in the 99th percentile
> > of texts in its use of parentheses. The average across the TCP is
> > something like 4 per 10,000 words, the figures for the Arcadia are
> > close to 30.
> >
> > As often with digital analyses, you don't really learn anything new.
> > But you get much firmer and more precise evidence of what you sort of
> > knew. In Sidney's case, this seems to me genuninely interesting. The
> > parenthetical style is clearly indicative of pretty deep narrative
> > habits, and a look at parentheses or m-dashes might bring out some
> > stylistic properties of a text very clearly.
> >
> >
> > On Sep 30, 2006, at 12:46 PM, HANNIBAL HAMLIN wrote:
> >
> >> Dear Learned Colleagues,
> >>
> >> Does anyone know of a study of punctuation in the English
> >> Renaissance? Something discussing what exactly (or inexactly) a
> >> comma or colon or exclamation mark means? I may be missing
> >> something, but I don't recall ever seeing such. Perhaps it's so
> >> remote from being a hot topic that no one has done it. Are there
> >> Renaissance works that treat punctuation, in and amongst other
> >> rhetorical matters? Hmm.
> >>
> >> Many thanks,
> >>
> >> Hannibal
> >>
> >>
> >> Hannibal Hamlin
> >> Associate Professor of English
> >> The Ohio State University
> >
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