The Virgule in the Poetry of the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Author / Editor
- Killough, George (B.)
The Virgule in the Poetry of the 'Canterbury Tales'
- Published
- Dissertation Abstracts International 39 (1979): 5496A.
- Description
- Virgule placement in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere mss. is highly regular. Syntactic and metrical rules can be used to predict 80 percent of the placements. The two mss agree in virgule placement 77 percent of the time. The 23 percent rate of disagreement indicates that the scribes must have placed the virgules according to the same sort of rules rather than from an examplar. The practice of midline poetic punctuation has precedent in latin grammatical theory.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies.