A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  An eleventh-century manuscript illumination showing Saint Benedict offering his Rules to an abbot. (photo credit 8.3)

  Benedict had renounced the world at the age of fourteen and relinquished the fortunes and titles of his wealthy Roman family. Around 529 he had founded a monastery on Monte Cassino — a craggy hill towering fifteen hundred feet over an ancient pagan shrine halfway between Rome and Naples — and composed a series of rules for his friars12 in which the authority of a code of laws replaced the absolute will of the monastery’s superior. Perhaps because he sought in the Scriptures the all-encompassing vision that would be granted to him years later, or perhaps because he believed, like Sir Thomas Browne, that God offered us the world under two guises, as nature and as a book,13 Benedict decreed that reading would be an essential part of the monastery’s daily life. Article 38 of his Rule laid out the procedure:

  At the meal time of the brothers, there should always be reading; no one may dare to take up the book at random and begin to read there; but he who is about to read for the whole week shall begin his duties on Sunday. And, entering upon his office after Mass and Communion, he shall ask all to pray for him, that God may avert from him the spirit of elation. And this verse shall be said in the oratory three times by all, he however beginning it: “O Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise.” And thus, having received the benediction, he shall enter upon his duties as reader. And there shall be the greatest silence at table, so that no whispering or any voice save the reader’s may be heard. And whatever is needed, in the way of food, the brethren should pass to each other in turn, so that no one need ask for anything.14

  As in the Cuban factories, the book to be read was not chosen at random; but unlike the factories, where the titles were chosen by consensus, in the cloister the choice was made by the community’s authorities. For the Cuban workers, the books could become (many times did become) the intimate possession of each listener; but for the disciples of Saint Benedict, elation, personal pleasure and pride were to be avoided, since the joy of the text was to be communal, not individual. The prayer to God, asking Him to open the reader’s lips, placed the act of reading in the hands of the Almighty. For Saint Benedict the text — the Word of God — was beyond personal taste, if not beyond understanding. The text was immutable and the author (or Author) the definitive authority. Finally, the silence at table, the audience’s lack of response, was necessary not only to ensure concentration but also to preclude any semblance of private commentary on the sacred books.15

  Later, in the Cistercian monasteries founded throughout Europe from the early twelfth century onwards, the Rule of Saint Benedict was used to ensure an orderly flow of monastic life in which personal agonies and desires were submitted to communal needs. Violations of the rules were punished with flagellation, and the offenders were separated from the fold, isolated from their brothers. Solitude and privacy were considered punishments; secrets were common knowledge; individual pursuits of any kind, intellectual or otherwise, were strongly discouraged; discipline was the reward of those who lived well within the community. In ordinary life, the Cistercian monks were never alone. At meals, their spirits were distracted from the pleasures of the flesh and joined in the holy word by Saint Benedict’s prescribed reading.16

  Coming together to be read to also became a necessary and common practice in the lay world of the Middle Ages. Up to the invention of printing, literacy was not widespread and books remained the property of the wealthy, the privilege of a small handful of readers. While some of these fortunate lords occasionally lent their books, they did so to a limited number of people within their own class or family.17 People who wished to acquaint themselves with a certain book or author often had a better chance of hearing the text recited or read out loud than of holding the precious volume in their own hands.

  There were different ways to hear a text. Beginning in the eleventh century, throughout the kingdoms of Europe, travelling joglars would recite or sing their own verses or those composed by their master troubadours, which the joglars would have stored in their prodigious memories. These joglars were public entertainers who performed at fairs and market-places, as well as before the courts. They were mostly of lowly birth and were usually denied both the protection of the law and the sacraments of the Church.18 Troubadours, such as Guillaume of Aquitaine, grandfather of Eleanor, and Bertran de Born, Lord of Hautefort, were of noble birth and wrote formal songs in praise of their unreachable love. Of the hundred or so troubadours known by name from the early twelfth to the early thirteenth century, when the fashion flourished, some twenty were women. It seems that, in general, the joglars were more popular than the troubadours, so that highbrow artists such as Peter Pictor complained that “some of the high ecclesiasts would rather listen to the fatuous verses of a joglar than to the well-composed stanzas of a serious Latin poet”19 — meaning himself.

  Being read to from a book was a somewhat different experience. A joglar’s recital had all the obvious characteristics of a performance, and its success or failure largely depended upon the performer’s skill at varying expressions, since the subject-matter was rather predictable. While a public reading also depended on the reader’s ability to “perform”, it laid the stress on the text rather than on the reader. The audience at a recital would watch a joglar perform the songs of a specific troubadour such as the celebrated Sordello; the audience at a public reading could listen to the anonymous History of Reynard the Fox read by any literate member of the household.

  In the courts, and sometimes also in humbler houses, books were read aloud to family and friends for instruction as well as for entertainment. Being read to at dinner was not intended to distract from the joys of the palate; on the contrary, it was meant to enhance them with imaginative entertainment, a practice carried over from the days of the Roman empire. Pliny the Younger mentioned in one of his letters that, when eating with his wife or a few friends, he liked to have an amusing book read out loud to him.20 In the early fourteenth century the Countess Mahaut of Artois travelled with her library packed into large leather bags, and in the evenings she had a lady-in-waiting read from them, whether philosophical works or entertaining accounts of foreign lands such as the Travels of Marco Polo.21 Literate parents read to their children. In 1399 the Tuscan notary Ser Lapo Mazzei wrote to a friend, the merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, asking him for the loan of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis to read aloud to his sons. “The boys would take delight in it on winter evenings,” he explained, “for it is, as you know, very easy reading.”22 In Montaillou, in the early fourteenth century, Pierre Clergue, the village priest, read out loud on different occasions from a so-called Book of the Faith of the Heretics, to those sitting around the fire in people’s homes; in the village of Ax-les-Thermes, at about the same time, the peasant Guillaume Andorran was discovered reading a heretic Gospel to his mother and tried by the Inquisition.23

  The fifteenth-century Évangiles des quenouilles (Gospels of the Distaffs) shows how fluid these informal readings could be. The narrator, an old learned man, “one night after supper, during the long winter nights between Christmas and Candlemas”, visits the house of an elderly lady, where several of the neighbourhood women often gather “to spin and talk about many happy and minor things”. The women, remarking that the men of their time “incessantly write defamatory lampoons and infectious books against the honour of the female sex,” ask the narrator to attend their meetings — a sort of reading group avant la lettre — and act as scrivener, while the women read out certain passages on the sexes, love affairs, marital relationships, superstitions and local customs, and comment on them from a female point of view. “One of us will begin her reading and read a few chapters to all the others present,” one of the spinners explains with enthusiasm, “so as to hold them and fix them permanently in our memories.”24 Over six days the women read, interrupt, comment, object and explain, and seem to enjoy themselves immensely, so much so that the
narrator finds their laxity tiresome and, though faithfully recording their words, judges their comments “lacking rhyme or reason”. The narrator is, no doubt, accustomed to more formal scholastic disquisitions by men.

  An early reading-group depicted in the sixteenth-century Les Evangiles des quenouilles. (photo credit 8.4)

  Informal public readings at casual gatherings were quite ordinary occurrences in the seventeenth century. Stopping at an inn in search of the errant Don Quixote, the priest who has so diligently burnt the books in the knight’s library explains to the company how reading novels of chivalry has upset Don Quixote’s mind. The innkeeper objects to this statement, confessing that he very much enjoys listening to these stories in which the hero valiantly battles giants, strangles monstrous serpents and single-handedly defeats huge armies. “During harvest time,” he says, “during the festivities, many of the labourers gather here, and there are always a few among them who can read, and one of them will pick up one of these books in his hands, and more than thirty strong we will collect around him, and listen to him with such delight that our white hairs turn young again.” His daughter too is part of the audience, but she dislikes the scenes of violence; she prefers “to hear the lamentations the knights make when their ladies are absent, which in truth sometimes make me weep with pity for them”. A fellow traveller, who happens to have with him a number of novels of chivalry (which the priest wants to burn at once), also carries in his bags the manuscript of a novel. Somewhat against his will, the priest agrees to read it out loud for all those present. The title of the novel is, appropriately, The Curious Impertinent,25 and its reading occupies the three following chapters, while everyone feels free to interrupt and comment at will.26

  So relaxed were these gatherings, so free of the strictures of institutionalized readings, that the listeners (or the reader) could mentally transfer the text to their own time and place. Two centuries after Cervantes, the Scottish publisher William Chambers wrote the biography of his brother Robert, with whom he had founded in 1832 the famous Edinburgh company that bears their name, and recollected certain such readings in their boyhood town of Peebles. “My brother and I,” he wrote, “derived much enjoyment, not to say instruction, from the singing of old ballads, and the telling of legendary stories, by a kind old female relative, the wife of a decayed tradesman, who dwelt in one of the ancient closes. At her humble fireside, under the canopy of a huge chimney, where her half-blind and superannuated husband sat dozing in a chair, the battle of Corunna and other prevailing news was strangely mingled with disquisitions on the Jewish wars. The source of this interesting conversation was a well-worn copy of L’Estrange’s translation of Josephus, a small folio of date 1720. The envied possessor of the work was Tam Fleck, ‘a flichty chield’, as he was considered, who, not particularly steady at his legitimate employment, stuck out a sort of profession by going about in the evening with his Josephus, which he read as the current news; the only light he had for doing so being usually that imparted by the flickering blaze of a piece of parrot coal. It was his practice not to read more than from two or three pages at a time, interlarded with sagacious remarks of his own by way of foot-notes, and in this way he sustained an extraordinary interest in the narrative. Retailing the matter with great equability in different households, Tam kept all at the same point of information, and wound them up with a corresponding anxiety as to the issue of some moving event in Hebrew annals. Although in this way he went through a course of Josephus yearly, the novelty somehow never seemed to wear off.”27

  “Weel, Tam, what’s the news the nicht?” would old Geordie Murray say, as Tam entered with his Josephus under his arm, and seated himself at the family fireside.

  “Bad news, bad news,” replied Tam. “Titus has begun to besiege Jerusalem — it’s gaun to be a terrible business.”28

  During the act of reading (of interpreting, of reciting), possession of a book sometimes acquires talismanic value. In the north of France, even today, village story-tellers use books as props; they memorize the text, but then show authority by pretending to read from the book, even if they are holding it upside down.29 Something about the possession of a book — an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation — endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation. What matters in these recitations is that the moment of reading be fully re-enacted — that is, with a reader, an audience and a book — without which the performance would not be complete.

  In Saint Benedict’s day being read to was considered a spiritual exercise; in later centuries this lofty purpose could be used to conceal other, less seemly functions. For instance, in the early nineteenth century, when the notion of a scholarly woman was still frowned upon in Britain, being read to became one of the socially accepted ways of studying. The novelist Harriet Martineau lamented in her Autobiographical Memoir, published after her death in 1876, that “when she was young it was not thought proper for a young lady to study very conspicuously; she was expected to sit down in the parlour with her sewing, listen to a book read aloud, and hold herself ready for callers. When the callers came, conversation often turned naturally on the book just laid down, which must therefore be very carefully chosen lest the shocked visitor should carry to the house where she paid her next call an account of the deplorable laxity shown by the family she had left.”30

  On the other hand, one might read out loud so as to produce this much-regretted laxity. In 1781, Diderot wrote amusingly about “curing” his bigoted wife, Nanette, who said she would not touch a book unless it contained something spiritually uplifting, by submitting her over several weeks to a diet of raunchy literature. “I have become her Reader. I administer three pinches of Gil Blas every day: one in the morning, one after dinner and one in the evening. When we have seen the end of Gil Blas we shall go on to The Devil on Two Sticks and The Bachelor of Salamanca and other cheering works of the same class. A few years and a few hundred such readings will complete the cure. If I were sure of success, I should not complain at the labour. What amuses me is that she treats everyone who visits her to a repeat of what I have just read her, so conversation doubles the effect of the remedy. I have always spoken of novels as frivolous productions, but I have finally discovered that they are good for the vapours. I will give Dr Tronchin the formula next time I see him. Prescription: eight to ten pages of Scarron’s Roman comique; four chapters of Don Quixote; a well-chosen paragraph from Rabelais; infuse in a reasonable quantity of Jacques the Fatalist or Manon Lescaut, and vary these drugs as one varies herbs, substituting others of roughly the same qualities, as necessary.”31

  Being read to allows the listener a confidential audience for the reactions which must usually take place unheard, a cathartic experience which the Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós described in one of his Episodios Nacionales. Doña Manuela, a nineteenth-century middle-class reader, retires to bed with the excuse of not wishing to become feverish by reading fully dressed under the light of the drawing-room lamp during a warm Madrid summer night. Her gallant admirer, General Leopoldo O’Donnell, offers to read to her out loud until she falls asleep, and chooses one of the pot-boilers that delight the lady, “one of those convoluted and muddled plots, badly translated from the French”. Guiding his eyes with his index finger, O’Donnell reads her the description of a duel in which a young blond man wounds a certain Monsieur Massenot:

  “How wonderful!” Doña Manuela exclaimed, enraptured. “That blond fellow, don’t you remember, is the artilleryman who came from Brittany disguised as a pedlar. By his looks, he must be the natural son of the duchess.… Carry on.… But according to what you just read,” Doña Manuela observed, “you mean to say he cut off Massenot’s nose?”

  “So it seems.… It says clearly: ‘Massenot’s face was covered with blood which ran like two rivulets across his greying moustache.’ ”

&nb
sp; “I’m delighted.… Serves him right, and let him come back for more. Now let’s see what else the author will tell us.”32

  Because reading out loud is not a private act, the choice of reading material must be socially acceptable to both the reader and the audience. At Steventon rectory, in Hampshire, the Austen family read to one another at all times of the day and commented on the appropriateness of each selection. “My father reads Cowper to us in the mornings, to which I listen when I can,” Jane Austen wrote in 1808. “We have got the second volume of [Southey’s] Espriella’s Letters and I read it aloud by candlelight.” “Ought I to be very pleased with [Sir Walter Scott’s] Marmion? As yet I am not. James [the eldest brother] reads it aloud every evening — the short evening, beginning about ten, and broken by supper.” Listening to Madame de Genlis’s Alphonsine, Austen is outraged: “We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure; and we changed it for [Lennox’s] the Female Quixote, which now makes our evening amusement, to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remember it.”33 (Later, in Austen’s writings, there will be echoes of these books she has heard read out loud, in direct references made by characters defined through their bookish likes or dislikes: Sir Edward Denham dismisses Scott as “tame” in Sanditon, and in Northanger Abbey John Thorpe remarks, “I never read novels” — though he immediately confesses to finding Fielding’s Tom Jones and Lewis’s The Monk “tolerably decent”.)