The punctuation system of the West-Saxon version of the Gospel according to Saint John

Abstract

In this paper, we approach the punctuation system of a medieval manuscript. This has been a matter, especially in the case of Old English, hardly studied by scholars. Thus, our knowledge about punctuation marks is somewhat restricted to just a few contributions (Harlow 1959; Mitchell 1980; Calle / Miranda Forth). However, in the last decade a number of studies dealing with medieval punctuation has come out shedding light on the use of scribal practices at the time. In this same line, we deal with the punctuation system found in the West-Saxon version of the Gospel according to Saint John to offer a detailed description of the use and function of the scribal marks of punctuation, and to find the correspondence with their modern counterparts. A corpus-based study of the text helps to classify the different examples and to reach grounded conclusions about the coherence of the punctuation symbols used.