Benjamin Rowe
(as posted to enochian-l)
In the course of transcribing Turner's translations of pseudo-Agrippa, I stumbled across something that seems worth mentioning here for its potential impact on interpretation of Dee's records. Some list members are likely already familiar with it, but I'm certain it is not common knowledge.
What I found out was that the standards of punctuation used today were not established in common use until well over a century after Dee's time, and that a somewhat different system was used in his time. Further, punctuation in Dee's time was more often used to indicate _elocutionary_ effects -- i.e., the way in which the words were to be spoken -- than it was used to clarify the syntax and meaning of the writing. Typically, a comma indicated a pause of one "unit", a semicolon two units, and three units for a colon. The punctuation in Elizabethan dramas is typically of this type.
The use of syntactical punctuation was first systematized by the noted Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in the early 1500's, in relation to publication of works in Latin and Greek, and was formalized by his grandson in 1566. Syntactical punctuation for English wasn't formally proposed until 1640, in a posthumous work of Ben Jonson, though no doubt it was known to those who read books in Latin from the time Aldus implemented it. Turner's translations clearly follow the system of Aldus, and it seems likely that Dee was also familiar with that system.
Under this system, a colon ":" is syntactically the same as a modern period ".". It is typically followed by a capitalized word, but with intervening articles and prepositions being uncapitalized. A period is used as an end-of-paragraph marker. A semicolon is sometimes used like a modern comma ","; at other times it is used as it is today, to separate two syntactically-complete but related parts of a sentence. And at yet other times, it is used as an end-of-sentence indicator. This use of colons and semicolons is why so much text of that period seems to modern eyes to consist of run-on sentences; we don't see it the way readers of the time would have seen it.
I think it is worth keeping these differences in mind when reading T&FR or the _Mysteriorum Libri_. I can recall several discussions here where interpretation of passages was dependent on the punctuation. We may have even ended up picking the wrong interpretation, by using the modern system.