Thomas Traherne on Punctuation

Though Thomas Traherne’s punctuation has been harshly criticized for its idiosyncrasy, scholars have also frequently admired the stylistic effects that it creates. His punctuation is linked to baroque art and music, the use of periods to highlighting subordinate ideas, capitalization to its inability to foster figurative language, and parentheses to his writing and editing process. This essay draws attention to a related, but different, issue that has remained unaddressed: what does Traherne himself have to say about punctuation? An examination of Traherne’s works shows that Traherne’s understanding of punctuation falls into two broad categories: the complex-metaphoric and the politico-religious. His metaphoric understanding, which belongs to a long tradition, can be gleaned from his references to the oracle of Delphi’s capital letters inscription; Ficino’s translation of Plato; and Ben Jonson’s borrowing from a fourteenth-century translation of Julius Scaliger’s grammar. Traherne’s politico-religious understanding of punctuation emerges most clearly in his Roman Forgeries (1673) in which he critiques a long list of ecclesiastical sources—epistles, church canons, multi-volume works of the councils—to argue that Catholic scribes and editors used punctuation for ideological purposes: to obfuscate, hide, and forge religious doctrines. Traherne’s comments reveal that early modern readers were likely to skip over text within parenthesis and marginal annotations and to be impressed by the use of all capital letters. Traherne’s textual criticism through the lens of punctuation helps us to understand early modern reading habits as well as the history of textual editing and textual transmission.