Comma,

Domenico da Comma [1264-1316]

'The inventor of one of our most familiar marks of punctuatin was born in Mantua and entered the Dominican order sometime before 1300, devoting the remainder of his life to scholarship. A near-contemporary of Dante, who travelled extensively among the universities and monasteries of the Euorope of his time, arguing for the usefulness of his little mark, he was at one point arraigned before the Inquisition on charges of heresy, on the grounds that no such punctuation was to be found in the scriptures, in the Early Church Fathers or even in classical literature, but he seems to have survived the experience unscathed.'

James Cochrane, Stipple Wink & Gusset.