Erasmus

An essay by Florence Hazrat explores how the parenthesis, a punctuation mark Erasmus called 'little moons' and George Puttenham praised as a 'figure of tolerable disorder', was embraced by Elizabethan writer Philip Sidney. The piece, published via Project Gutenberg, examines how Sidney used parentheses not as a minor device but as an essential tool of his prose and poetry, despite Renaissance warnings that they be used sparingly and not 'too thick'.