Punctuation Practice in Two Early Modern English Versions of The Secrets of Alexis
Keywords:
Punctuation, Early Modern English, Handwriting, Printing, The Secrets of AlexisAbstract
Despite being traditionally ignored in most books on historical palaeography, punctuation has received in the last decades a great deal of attention due to the proliferation of studies considering its uses, functions and distribution. Even though it has been extensively addressed in the specific literature, the analysis of punctuation in different formats of identical pieces has been hitherto disregarded, perhaps due to an erroneous assumption that manuscripts employed a lighter and a less consistent repertory than printed books. The present article therefore aims to analyse the use and diffusion of the phenomenon in two Early Modern English versions of Girolamo Ruscelli’s The Secrets of Alexis, in order to shed some light on the contrasts and similarities between scribal and editorial punctuation procedures, if any. This article is then conceived with a twofold objective: to examine the quantitative distribution of the punctuation symbols attested in the documents under scrutiny; and to analyse their role at the different textual levels, i.e. macro-textual, sentence, clause and phrase level.
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