“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.
If you would like to attend the meeting, we kindly ask that you fill out the RSVP form linked to below by Friday, May 7th, rather than responding to us by email, so that we can tally the list of attendees.
Click here to RSVP
Those who respond will then receive an email Zoom invitation from Alan Stewart shortly before the 11th that will include a link and password to let you access the meeting.
You do not need to own the software Zoom since you will be invited through the link. (We recommend opening the link 5-10 minutes before 4:00 PM that afternoon.) You must turn on your computer's speaker system when joining. You will then discover two buttons to the lower left of the bottom Zoom task bar that allow you to join audially and visually.
As has become our new custom, we will stipulate an ending time of 6:15 PM, which will allow for a few minutes of informal conversation over a virtual toast of wine (BYOW). Everything will be aural and visual, including the PowerPoint slides. You can participate with or without your own camera on (or with it covered with tape, if you prefer). During the talk, we will ask everyone to "mute" their microphone (if you have not taken part before, how to do this will be made clear once we're all in the Zoom meeting).
