Author: Elizabeth Bell Canon

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9781433108327

Can an author's preference for expressing modality be quantified and then used as a marker of attribution? This book explores the possibility of using the subjunctive mood as an indicator of style and a marker of authorship in Early Modern English texts. Using three works by the sixteenth-century biblical translator and polemicist, William Tyndale, Elizabeth Bell Canon establishes a predictable preference for certain types of modal expression. The theory of subjunctive use as a marker of attribution was then tested on the anonymous 1533 English translation of Erasmus' Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Also included in this book is a modern English spelling version Tyndale's The Parable of the Wicked Mammon.