The Virgula, Diple and Punctum : PAUSE AND EFFECT: An Introduction to the History of the Punctuation in the West, <i> By M.B. Parkes (University of California Press: $55; 343 pp. with 74 black-and-white plates)</i>

Marks of punctuation, those friendly but firm little sentinels and traffic signs on the information byways of the printed page, are not something we ordinarily give much notice to. Subliminally inflecting our understanding, they seem as much a part of our language as the alphabet itself. M. B. Parkes, Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, has written a fascinating, wide-ranging and immensely learned book exploring the development and usages of these minute signals from ancient times up to the 20th Century. The concentration is on medieval manuscripts, as this is both Parkes’ specialty and represents the period of punctuation’s greatest development.

The preponderance of ancient texts were written down in scripto continuo --without separations between words or indications of pauses. These texts were not read in the sense we understand the word but were analyzed for proper rhetorical phrasing, much in the way play scripts or musical scores are used today by performers. What few antique marks of punctuation as did arise were not supplied by authors but by teachers for the instruction of students and inexperienced orators. The magisterial speaker Cicero scorned such devices, insisting that the end of a sentence should be clear not from “a stroke interposed by a copyist but by the constraint of the rhythm.”

In the Middle Ages, writing gradually came to be seen as not simply the record of the spoken word but as a medium of thought and discourse in its own right. The 6th-Century bishop Isadore of Seville was the first to remark on the advantages of silent reading; requiring less physical involvement, it encouraged retention and reflection.

With the passing of classical learning and rhetoric, and the rise of scribal copying of Latin texts in the monasteries for the transmission of Christian doctrine and exegesis, there grew a need for a system of interpretive notation. Numerous versions of these were developed in different centers of learning, not only to assist monks in their silent reading and transcription in a language they were not always masters of, but also to ensure canonical (and discourage heretical) interpretations of the Scriptures.

The littera notabilior, or “noticeable letter,” was the precursor to our capitals. The punctum, or “point,” was employed singly and multiply in various positions to indicate different sorts of grammatical pauses, as was the virgula, which looked like the modern slash mark. The diple, a kind of wedge-shaped pointer, was first used to highlight quotations from the Bible and ultimately became the basis for our quotation marks.

Irish monks made an especially significant contribution to the development of Western punctuation. Since their own language was quite different from the Romance ones, they were particularly enabled to perceive written Latin as a visual language. Page decoration and layout as well as variant calligraphic forms were combined with punctuation devices to produce complex layers of meaning, interpretation and textual hierarchy.

As the demand for book copying increased and became secularized in the later Middle Ages, the scriptural traditions of punctuation were diffused. With the establishment of type foundries and the advent of printing, the punctuation repertoire was simplified and its usage increasingly codified. Several useful distinctions did not survive, such as that between the earnest punctus interrogativus, signaling a question requiring an answer and the punctus percontativus, denoting its brasher rhetorical sibling.

The last sections of “Pause and Effect” follow the story up through the modern era, with examples of printed prose and poetry by Thomas Nashe, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf and others. By this time punctuation had become far more strategic than simply interpretational. This was due in part to the strong dichotomy that had emerged in secular writing between content and form, or, alternatively, between the underlying logic of what was said and the rhetorical devices used to express it convincingly, a division that could never have been made regarding scriptural texts.

The author’s chapter “The Layout and Punctuation of Verse” and his brief assessment of punctuation emendations made by modern editors open up new topics for consideration and are well worth reading by anyone involved in literary studies. Alongside the 74 full-page plates giving manuscript and printed illustrations of Parkes’ examples are full transcriptions, translations and annotations, making these a useful learning tool for the curious non-specialist.

The foregoing account is only a rather breathless precis of the material covered. Parkes has produced a densely informative synthesis that is not simply about, as the subtitle has it, the history of punctuation in the West. In his analysis of the subtle grammatical and rhetorical distinctions developed through the interpretation and creation of all sorts of texts he has begun to examine some of the deeper properties and purposes of language itself.