Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Ilio pubem (“a people gathered from Troy”) instead of collectam exilio pubem (“a people gathered for
exile”). Such mistakes were common when reading a continuous text.
In the fifth century BC, a reader would have read out loud, unrolling her scroll with one hand while
rolling it up with the other, exposing section after section. (photo credit 3.2)
Paul’s Epistles as read by Augustine were not a scroll but a codex, a bound papyrus manuscript in
continuous writing, in the new uncial or semi-uncial hand which had appeared in Roman documents in the
last years of the third century. The codex was a pagan invention; according to Suetonius, Julius Caesar
was the first to fold a roll into pages, for dispatches to his troops. The early Christians adopted the codex
because they found it highly practical for carrying around, hidden away in their clothes, texts that were
forbidden by the Roman authorities. The pages could be numbered, which allowed the reader easier
access to the sections, and separate texts, such as Paul’s Epistles, could easily be bound in one
convenient package.
The separation of letters into words and sentences developed very gradually. Most early scripts —
Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Sanskrit — had no use for such divisions. The ancient scribes
were so familiar with the conventions of their craft that they apparently needed hardly any visual aids,
and the early Christian monks often knew by heart the texts they were transcribing. In order to help
those whose reading skills were poor, the monks in the scriptorium made use of a writing method known
as per cola et commata, in which the text was divided into lines of sense — a primitive form of
punctuation that helped the unsteady reader lower or raise the voice at the end of a block of thought.
(This format also helped a scholar seeking a certain passage to find it with greater ease.) It was Saint
Jerome who, at the end of the fourth century, having discovered this method in copies of Demosthenes
and Cicero, first described it in his introduction to his translation of the Book of Ezekiel, explaining that
“what is written per cola et commata conveys more obvious sense to the readers”.
Punctuation remained unreliable, but these early devices no doubt assisted the progress of silent reading.
By the end of the sixth century, Saint Isaac of Syria was able to describe the benefits of the method: “I
practise silence, that the verses of my readings and prayers should fill me with delight. And when the
pleasure of understanding them silences my tongue, then, as in a dream, I enter a state when my senses
and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is
stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly
arising to delight my heart.” And in the mid-seventh century, the theologian Isidore of Seville was
sufficiently familiar with silent reading to be able to praise it as a method for “reading without effort,
reflecting on that which has been read, rendering their escape from memory less easy”. Like Augustine
before him, Isidore believed that reading made possible a conversation across time and space, but with
one important distinction. “Letters have the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are
absent,” he wrote in his Etymologies. Isidore’s letters did not require sounds.
The avatars of punctuation continued. After the seventh century, a combination of points and dashes
indicated a full stop, a raised or high point was equivalent to our comma, and a semicolon was used as we
use it today. By the ninth century, silent reading was probably common enough in the scriptorium for
scribes to start separating each word from its encroaching neighbours to simplify the perusal of a text —
but perhaps also for aesthetic reasons. At about the same time, the Irish scribes, celebrated throughout
the Christian world for their skill, began isolating not only parts of speech but also the grammatical
constituents within a sentence, and introduced many of the punctuation marks we use today. By the tenth
century, to further ease the silent reader’s task, the first lines of the principal sections of a text (the books
of the Bible, for example) were ordinarily written in red ink, as well as the rubrics (from the Latin for
“red”), explanations independent of the text proper. The ancient practice of beginning a new paragraph
with a dividing stroke (paragraphos in Greek) or wedge (diple) continued; later the first letter of the new
paragraph was written in a slightly larger or upper-case character.
The first regulations requiring scribes to be silent in the monastic scriptoriums date from the ninth
century. Until then, they had worked either by dictation or by reading to themselves out loud the text they
were copying. Sometimes the author himself or a “publisher” dictated the book. An anonymous scribe,
concluding his copying sometime in the eighth century, writes this: “No one can know what efforts are

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demanded. Three fingers write, two eyes see. One tongue speaks, the entire body labours.”One tongue
speaks as the copyist works, enunciating the words he is transcribing.
Once silent reading became the norm in the scriptorium, communication among the scribes was done by
signs: if a scribe required a new book to copy, he would pretend to turn over imaginary pages; if he
specifically needed a psalter, he’d place his hands on his head in the shape of a crown (in reference to
King David); a lectionary was indicated by wiping away imaginary wax from candles; a missal, by the sign
of the cross; a pagan work, by scratching his body like a dog.
Reading out loud with someone else in the room implied shared reading, deliberate or not. Ambrose’s
reading had been a solitary act. “Perhaps he was afraid,” Augustine mused, “that if he read out loud, a
difficult passage by the author he was reading would raise a question in the mind of an attentive listener,
and he would then have to explain what it meant or even argue about some of the more abstruse points.”
But with silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book
and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could
exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s
thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory
or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal. The reader had time to consider and reconsider
the precious words whose sounds — he now knew — could echo just as well within as without. And the
text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the reader’s own possession, the reader’s
intimate knowledge, whether in the busy scriptorium, the market-place or the home.
Some dogmatists became wary of the new trend; in their minds, silent reading allowed for day-dreaming,
for the danger of accidie — the sin of idleness, “the destruction that wasteth at noonday”. But silent
reading brought with it another danger the Christian fathers had not foreseen. A book that can be read
privately, reflected upon as the eye unravels the sense of the words, is no longer subject to immediate
clarification or guidance, condemnation or censorship by a listener. Silent reading allows unwitnessed
communication between the book and the reader, and the singular “refreshing of the mind”, in
Augustine’s happy phrase.
Until silent reading became the norm in the Christian world, heresies had been restricted to individuals
or small numbers of dissenting congregations. The early Christians were preoccupied both with
condemning the unbelievers (the pagans, the Jews, the Manicheans and, after the seventh century, the
Muslims) and with establishing a common dogma. Arguments digressing from orthodox belief were either
vehemently rejected or cautiously incorporated by Church authorities, but because these heresies had no
large followings, they were treated with considerable leniency. The catalogue of these heretical voices
includes several remarkable imaginations: in the second century the Montanists claimed (already) to be
returning to the practices and beliefs of the primitive Church, and to have witnessed the second coming
of Christ in the form of a woman; in the second half of that century the Monarchianists concluded from
the definition of the Trinity that it was God the Father who had suffered on the Cross; the Pelagians,
contemporaries of Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose, rejected the notion of original sin; the
Apollinarians declared, in the last years of the fourth century, that the Word, and not a human soul, was
united with Christ’s flesh in the Incarnation; in the fourth century the Arians objected to the word