The History of Reading in the West

"This is a landmark book in the history of reading. In the voices of many different scholars, it offers an excellent introduction to the complexities of trying to understand reading. The history of reading is an offshoot of the history of the book. It’s a field that’s been getting a lot of attention since the 1980s. These historians are trying to uncover who read what when, in what settings, for what purposes, and with what effects. In some contexts people read aloud, in groups, but of course reading often happened in private and silently. However we read, what we retain from it is a personal mental process which is very hard for the historian to track. The essays in this volume span a broad period, from antiquity to the present, although the various forms of ebook have developed tremendously since this volume was published. It focuses on Europe, including European Jews, and emphasises that reading is context dependent. We know from our own personal experience today that we read different texts in different ways. We also can’t assume that our ways of reading translate seamlessly to different contexts in the past. “Reading” covers a wide range of practices. Medieval scholasticism, for example, favoured a ponderous kind of reading of difficult Latin texts done by a few qualified scholars with pen in hand to comment on them. This kind of reading typically took place in a library or study with access to many other learned books. Novel reading was very different when it developed, especially in the 18th century – novels were viewed as engrossing and escapist entertainment, which was typically enjoyed in a nice comfy chair. Interestingly, this kind of reading, which we try to encourage in our children today, worried people in the 18th century. Wouldn’t girls especially get carried away by flights of fancy? People thought it important to control reading. For instance, it was considered better to have girls read in a circulating library since a public setting imposed limits on how far they could get carried away. So some of the fears parents have today about kids playing video games used to apply to reading. From antiquity through the early modern period orality played a huge role in the dissemination of information. Town criers communicated news; peasants might gather at their master’s house to hear him read a chivalric story. Oral experience was a crucial way to access information and still is, of course, today. Recording plays a key role in saving orality, but that technology began only in the late 19th century. The way that we recover orality from before then is through written traces. When all we have as historians are written records, we can get clues about oral events through notes taken while listening, for example, to a sermon or a lecture or a play. Taking notes during sermons started in the Middle Ages. The work of a great sermonist like Bernard of Clairvaux survived because he would plant a secretary in the audience to take notes while he preached. Bernard would finalise his sermon based on these notes and release it for “publication” by copying. We also have books that purport to record the table talk or notable conversation of people who were considered important in their day, like Martin Luther or Samuel Johnson. Written traces of oral experiences of these kinds can help us understand oral experience, but of course the bulk of oral experience is lost beyond recovery. The history of information is fast becoming a global field of study. In the history of pre-modern reference works lots of fascinating work is being done on cultures with a long tradition of textual accumulation, like China and the Islamic world, for example. The history of archives has in many cases been pioneered by work on colonial archives, from Spanish America to 19th century India. The works I’ve described have a strong European focus, because of my own area of expertise, but the questions that the history of information is asking can be posed about every culture. I recommend the recent “conversation” in the American Historical Review on “historical perspectives on the circulation of information” which shows how a broad range of historians are thinking about the history of information on a global scale. A Google search will turn it up for you."

"Where Manguel’s book is a very readable and accessible introduction to the history of reading, this book is a more scholarly anthology of articles by experts in every different historical period. Taken together, these articles trace chronologically the ways in which reading has changed, starting with reading aloud in classical Greece to the shift from the scroll to the book in the Roman world. Then you have the growth of silent reading in the Middle Ages . One of the continuities that emerges is the sense that reading progressively becomes less embodied. Roman writers talk about reading as a healthy form of physical exercise, because you read standing up and you use your voice. Whereas today we often think of it as a virtual out of body experience. Reading about these different historical periods, you can also see reading move indoors. In Greece and Rome, people read in gardens, in public squares and in the street. In the Middle Ages the place of reading shifted to monks’ cells, to churches and to courts. And then in the modern age the space of reading shifted again once rail travel was invented. That gave people a whole new window of opportunity for reading – reading in a horse-drawn carriage would make you nauseous, but trains are smooth and well lit. Reading became public once more."