“Punctuation and the Drafting of the King James Bible”
The King James Bible (KJB), first published in 1611, occupies a place of central importance in the wider history of the role of punctuation in English literature. The work can seem a great testament to the so-called “rhetorical” approach to punctuation across early modern English writing at large, before the supposed shift occurred to what has been termed a primarily “grammatical” approach, a transition conventionally positioned by scholars as having been effected over the course of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Yet despite the importance of the KJB within the arc of that grand narrative, the actual genesis of the KJB’s own punctuation has received very little attention in past studies of the work, and many modern considerations of the text’s complex drafting process have overlooked the matter altogether. This may in part be due to a general sense that has emerged in modern scholarship that any full study of the KJB’s punctuation would be “futile,” in terms of being both doomed to failure and largely a waste of scholarly energy on one of the text’s least “authoritative” features.
This talk reexamines what considering the role of punctuation (both in English and in other languages) in the drafting of the KJB might tell us with respect to the KJB itself and more broadly. In doing so, the talk builds upon important, recent archival discoveries related to the KJB’s famously complex composition process, including mounting the first exploration of the KJB’s punctuation in light of the recent identification of what now stands as the KJB’s earliest known draft, the only one yet uncovered definitively in the hand of one of the work’s own translators. Ultimately, in addition to challenging the common divide between “rhetorical” and “grammatical” punctuation in the case of the KJB and beyond, the talk attempts to draw attention to the significance of considering what might be termed a third category of punctuation, alongside or apart from the rhetorical and grammatical: the scribal or “graphical.” The talk then concludes by reflecting on what this might mean with regard to, not just the place of punctuation in the KJB or other works from the period, but the dynamic nature of early modern writing processes more generally.
