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Dear Jonathan,  I think that AZ has fried my mind.  Did we not have dinner some months ago?  Were you at Austin then? How is Bridget
 and the now stalwart Charlie.  You need not reply, but you must be a select group of scholars who count lulus, or whatever your call them.  Best wishews, Tom Roche
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Lamb <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, September 30, 2006 11:58 am
Subject: Re: Renaissance Punctuation
To: [log in to unmask]

> Hannibal and others,
> 
> There is, of course, the standard history of punctuation: 
> Pause and effect : an introduction to the history of 
> punctuation in the West. / Parkes, M. B. (Malcolm Beckwith) 
> / Berkeley / 1993.
> 
> There's also "They Had Their Points: Punctuation and 
> Interpretation in English Renaissance Literature"  By: 
> Ronberg, Gert; pp. 55-63 IN: Jucker, Andreas H. (ed.); 
> Jacobs, Andreas (introd.); Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic 
> Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: 
> Benjamins; 1995. xv, 623 pp (Apologies for copying this 
> entry straight from the online catalog.)
> 
> As for Martin Meuller's note about Sidney's use of 
> parentheses: you may be remembering Evans' comments in his 
> introduction to the revised Arcadia (p 49).  He correctly 
> says that "no other Elizabethan prose work uses brackets so 
> extensively, and it would seem to be an idiosyncrasy of 
> Sidney himself."  I have recently completed a year's worth 
> of research on Sidney's use of lunulae (Erasmus' clever word 
> for parentheses, which Parkes and John Lennard borrow).  As 
> it turns out, the revised portion of the Arcadia contains 
> 2,388 pairs of lunulae and some 191,165 words.  That's a 
> rate of only 80.05 words for every pair of parentheses. 
> Other prose works use far fewer parentheses.  Nashe's 
> Unfortunate Traveller, for example, uses parentheses at a 
> rate of 337.66 words per parenthetical, while Lyly's Euphues 
> has a rate of 728.55.  The only text I have found that uses 
> parentheses more frequently than the Arcadia is Robert 
> Kittowe's Loues Load-starre (1600), which uses 61.44 words 
> for every parenthesis (20,766 words and 338 pairs of 
> lunulae).  Precisely why does Sidney's text use so many 
> parentheses?  I'm sure I have some ideas....
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan P. Lamb
> Department of English
> University of Texas at Austin
> 1 University Station B5000
> Austin TX 78712
> 
> 
> 
> Martin Mueller wrote:
> > 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
> > 
> > 
>