Talk:Of Plymouth Plantation

Literary style

What is the liteary syle of this peice? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.3.16.1 (talk • contribs) 01:43, 30 October 2007

The text is available online. You can read it. We won't do your homework for you, and if the style is not obvious then we need a published description of such details to ensure it is properly described. -- SEWilco (talk) 03:06, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization

In the first sentence of the article, the book is referred to as of Plymouth Plantation. Seeing that there is a section on the name of the book, is the lowercase o intentional? If so, should it say that it's supposed to be lowercase and it can't b/c of technical restrictions, e.g. Long_s? Otherwise, it's a simple fix. JMtB03 (talk) 00:49, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Plimoth or Plimmoth?

At the top of Bradford's diary, the form used is actually Plim̃oth. In the writing and printing of the time, a tilde or line above a letter indicated a missing nasal consonant (m, n or ng). It's likely, then, that the spelling intended was in fact Plimmoth in modern script. Could the article text be updated to reflect this, or at least to include the diacritic used?—Jchthys 20:23, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Jchthys: This observation is idiosyncratic (in the literal sense). I am aware of four transcriptions of this document from the original manuscript: 1. Nathaniel Morton's (Bradford's nephew and secretary) who transcribed it into the Plymouth Church records, from which it was printed by Alexander Young. 2. The anonymous transcriber who provided a long-hand transcription for the Massachusetts Historical Society from which it printed the document in Vol. 3 of series 4 of its Collections (in 1856). 3. The transcription commissioned by the Massachusetts legislature in 1898 when it received the manuscript from the library of the Bishop of London. And, 4. Prof. Samuel Morison who spent 5 years carefully transcribing from the original document in the 1950s. Not one of these efforts considered the name to be "Of Plimmouth Plantation." The 1898 version is instructive. It went to great length to include every peculiar misspelling, abbreviation, contraction and printer's direction by Bradford. For example, from the Ms page on the front of the article, p. 2 of the 1898 version has "watered with y^e blooud of y^e martires ..." Moreover, the 1898 transcription includes macrons used to indicate doubling. On p. 9 of the transcripot (p. 4 of the Ms) it has a macron to indicate a missing letter over the "m" in "comon wealth" as well as over the "n" in "wine" (for "win"). So in that transcript there was an understanding of the use of macrons, but the transcriber did not consider the mark above the "m" in "plimouth" in the title to be a macron. It would be odd for Braddock to spell "plimmouth" that way, given that the word was ubiquitous, including the major port of England. And to believe he intended it, you would have to check other uses of the word in the manuscript. But try as I might I can't find a manuscript on line. Moreover, you simply cannot judge what the mark on the first page was without seeing the manuscript. Morison has a discussion of how the manuscript shows marks, including underlines and notations, by many other people who handled it (including Rev. Price who extensively marked the document, including revising the original spelling and language). Morison says that only by looking at the original manuscript can you tell who made a mark (often by the color of the ink) and indeed whether a mark was intended or simply an "inadvertent blot" from a quill pen. You simply cannot make an assertion about how to transcribe a manuscript without seeing the manuscript personally, especially in something that purports to be an encyclopedic article.

I intend to come back to do some overhauling of this article (which surprisingly makes no reference at all to the most studious examination of the manuscript or to any of the annotations of any of the printed editions over the last century and a half). I will remove the parts of the article which are based on this observation on the ground that it is unsupported by reliable third-party authority unless you can show me why the revisions you made to the article are justified. Cheers. AnthroMimus (talk) 01:57, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for this, AnthroMimus! I think this is probably a good call to make. I would be interested in seeing how the article develops and what the mark turns out to be – alas, I too am not at leisure to research this or see the original manuscript. Best, —Jchthys 03:28, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Not sure if this is relevant here, but the original Plymouth in Devon, England is so named as it stands at the mouth of the River Plym at the English Channel, ie Plym-mouth. So the doubling of the m in the pronunciation of the name reflects its etymology as a place name. 31.51.210.171 (talk) 10:02, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Article could address ways that Bradford relates the Puritan's journey to people in Old and New Testaments

Perhaps we could find some interpretive sources which might suggest how Bradford uses Biblical allusions to relate the journey of the Puritans to earlier experiences of certain figures and groups in the Old and New Testaments. For instance if you read his text, you will notice that just after Bradford recounts the hardships of the Puritans' journey across the Atlantic (i.e. damage their ship, etc.), he makes a reference to Paul's shipwreck (New Testament book of Acts)--thus essentially relating the two events. In that same Biblical passage to which he alludes, Paul and his companions are assisted by barbarians. He could very well be relating this to making peace with the native Americans, which he describes in passages later in his narrative. We might even be able to find some sources that could relate the first Thanksgiving to the Last Supper. It could also be said that he makes a series of connections between the Puritans and the ancient Hebrews in their journey out of Egypt to the Promised Land, some obvious other implied. For instance we could find sources relating similar steps taken in both journeys: Moses (Heberws' leader)=Bradford (Puritans' leader); Egypt (slavery)=England (persecution); Red Sea=Atlantic Ocean; Trials in desert=hardships on Mayflower; Mt. Pisgah (or Mt. Nemo, from where Moses looks down before his people enter promised land)=Plymouth Rock (at Cape Cod, hence "Plymouth Plantation"); Promised Land=New World. We could also find sources addressing how he uses these connections to keep his followers from giving up hope in the face of adversity, and how his piece conjures up a certain "manifest destiny" myth that shares parallels with others in history, particularly in religious texts. So, let's see what sources we could come up with to enrich this article, which is missing out on a big part of what the makes Bradford's narrative interesting from a literary and thematic standpoint. Garagepunk66 (talk) 19:34, 6 September 2015 (UTC)