Customer Reviews

Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West

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The ancient Greeks and Romans wrote without punctuation to interrupt their texts. That was left to the reader to interpret the places to pause, stop, or otherwise divide the text.

As Latin grew to be a second language in the Middle Ages, scribes began to give their readers more assistance in interpretation - thus our Western punctuation became varied and prolific.

The invention of the printing press standardized and froze our choice of punctuation.

The author does an amazing job of showing by example how the needs of the both the readers & writers of each period developed into the selection of marks which we use today.

The illustrations of manuscripts being in the back of the book rather than interspersed in the text makes for some shuffling, but the illustrations also carry their own clear descriptions of the particular punctuation practice which they illuminate.

English translations of most of the Latin text used as examples are thoughtfully provided.

I wish we still had use of the rhetorical question mark to indicate a question not requiring an answer!

The presentation is not "pedantic" but "scholarly" or "academic."

Yes, Greek and Latin used "punctuation."

No, Latin did not "become a second language."

An incunabulum is a printed piece that was produced before 1500, thus in the "cradle" of the print period.

(Manuscript books were still being produced after the advent of the printing press. Medieval books in manuscript are called usually called "codices" or even "codexes.")

Parkes' work reproduces legible pages from manuscripts so that the reader can see exactly what he is transcribing on the facing page and judge for themselves. Helpfully, he also translates the text and comments on its punctuation.

Sorry, but this book has no general (topical) index, and it would indeed be more useful if it had one. Still, it has some highly useful features, like the glossary of terms at the end.

It's too bad that reviews on this book are pretty much beside the point since this book is out of print, and as far as I can tell no one has had a used copy for sale on Amazon in a couple of years. As many as seven requests for it have been outstanding at one time.

U of Cal Press has no plans to reprint it. It is the only book-length work in the 20th c. devoted to a systematic analysis of medieval punctuation practice with most examples from Latin and a few from the vernacular languages. If you are researching punctuation at any period, any Western European language, then this book should be on your list of "Works Cited."

At least one copy is held as "non-circulating" in larger university libraries; otherwise, whoever has it checked out just keeps it-- forever.

Parkes' book is *the* standard history of punctuation in Western writing. It is written by a first-rate scholar who has spent a career studying the original manuscripts, and tells an excellent story, if you're interested in such things. As you might expect from such a specialized subject, the presentation is fairly academic, but if you want to understand how modern conventions of punctuation developed, this is the book to read.

Parkes writes in a manner that does his subject justice -- though the index isn't quite what I need it to be, his research (as far as I can judge) is exquisitely thorough, and the incunabula in the appendices are fascinating. Compliments to the author, regrets to the indexer.

...His assessment of manuscript practices is enhanced by a vast fund of knowledge in classical and medieval history. Parkes has always had an unpretentious way of relating the somewhat esoteric points of palaeography to the wider currents of reading and writing in his chosen time periods. He is able to make you see that grammar and literacy in pre-Reformation Europe were very precious attainments, and that the tradition of classical and later monastic education involved highly sophisticated learning techniques for very good reasons. Highly recommended for the closet pedant with a taste for the lost art of reading!