‘The Egiptians adored the Sun, and called it the visible sone of the invisible God’: Clausal Boundaries in Early Modern English Scientific Handwritten Texts

Abstract

In comparison with late Middle English, a period characterised by a high level of orthographic variation, the beginning of the 16th century witnesses the emergence of an identifiable standard English spelling, which was not completed in print until about 1650 (Nevalainen 2006: 32; Rutkowska 2013: 48). Punctuation is no exception, and it is in the earlymodern period when the English language definitely consolidates a wider inventory of punctuation symbols which, after their incorporation into the English system of punctuation, were soon immersed in a process of specialisation for the expression of new syntactic relations. The study of punctuation has traditionally focused on Old and Middle English handwritten material – literary and scientific texts in particular – while the early modern period has been generally left unexplored (Calle-Martín forthcoming). The existing approaches to the topic are, however, descriptions of the specific systems found in individual texts, which offer a minute analysis of the choices and preferences of particular scribes. The diachronic approach has been frequently disregarded, perhaps on the erroneous assumption that punctuation lacks uniformity. The present paper, therefore, sets out to analyse scribal punctuation from a diachronic perspective in Early Modern English in order to shed some new light on the standardisation of punctuation symbols in the expression of three types of clauses: coordinate clauses, adjectival clauses (defining and non-defining relative clauses) and conditional if-clauses. The study relies on handwritten material from the Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose for the historical period 1500–1700. The corpus has been compiled so as to contain both theoretical treatises and recipe material written in the 16th and 17th centuries, which allows for a diachronic and variationist approach to the study of punctuation.