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Figure 8.1 Double and single virgules in a late-fifteenth-century
copy of the Brwi Chronicle, a legendary account of the founding of Britain.

points that were also used to mark intermediate pauses and stops—the
descendants of Aristophanes’s ancient distinctiones, in fact—and which
were now carelessly placed at varying heights in relation to the text.4
Though the modern comma eventually superseded it, the virgule lives
on in the French term for that mark of punctuation—la virgule is still
with us.15

Frustratingly for our purposes, the enticingly dashlike virgule
plana did not catch on, but rather conceded its role in marking the
, completion of a sentence to its oblique sibling. From the thirteenth
century, scribes began to use a pair of virgules (//) to indicate that a
pilcrow or other section mark should be inserted into the text; ignored

THE DASH 3»- 149

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Figure 8.2 Double slashes, or virgules, are just visible behind the
pilcrows in this heavily annotated copy of Aristotle dated to the second half
ofthe thirteenth century.

bya harried rubricator, the plaintive // became a mark of punctuation
in its own right rather than a piece of scaffolding in the manuscript-
production process. Thus, the decline of the pilcrow went hand in
hand not only with the rise of the indented paragraph’ but also that
ofthe double virgule, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
I and II were customarily employed to mark minor and major pauses
respectively.16

Still, the virgula plana limped on, cropping up in manuscripts
as disparate as fourteenth-century medical recipes and nineteenth-
century plays.'7 Some modern treatises on punctuation do hint at a
connection between the medieval virgule and the modern dash—
Oxford University Press’s Poetry Handbook nonchalantly mentions

'Sec chapter 1, “The Pilcrow (J).”