Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

Any Language Whatsoever: “When you show a child an object, a dress for instance, has it ever occurred

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to you to show him separately first the frills, then the sleeves, after that the front, the pockets, the
buttons, etc.? No, of course not; you show him the whole and say to him: this is a dress. That is how
children learn to speak from their nurses; why not do the same when teaching them to read? Hide from
them all the ABCs and all the manuals of French and Latin; entertain them with whole words which they
can understand and which they will retain with far more ease and pleasure than all the printed letters and
syllables.”
In our time, the blind learn to read in a similar manner, by “feeling” the entire word — which they know
already — rather than deciphering it letter by letter. Recalling her education, Helen Keller said that as
soon as she had learned to spell, her teacher gave her slips of cardboard on which whole words were
printed in raised letters. “I quickly learned that each printed word stood for an object, an act or a quality.
I had a frame in which I could arrange the words in little sentences; but before I ever put sentences in the
frame I used to make them into objects. I found the slips of paper which represented, for example, doll, is,
on, bed and placed each name on its object; then I put my doll on the bed with the words is, on, bed
arranged beside the doll, thus making a sentence of the words, and at the same time carrying out the idea
of the sentence with the things themselves.” For the blind child, since words were concrete objects that
could actually be touched, they could be supplanted, as language signs, by the objects they were made to
represent. This, of course, was not the case for the Sélestat students, for whom the words on the page
remained abstract signs.
The same notebook was used over several years, possibly for economic reasons, because of the cost of
paper, but more probably because Hofman wanted his students to keep a progressive record of their
lessons. Rhenanus’s handwriting shows hardly any change as he copies out texts over the years. Set in
the centre of the page, leaving large margins and broad spaces between lines for later glosses and
comments, his handwriting imitates the Gothic script of German fifteenth-century manuscripts, the
elegant hand that Gutenberg was to copy when cutting the letters for his Bible. Strong and clear, in bright
purple ink, the handwriting allowed Rhenanus to follow the text with growing ease. Decorated initials
appear on several pages (they remind me of the elaborate lettering with which I used to illumine my
homework in the hope of better marks). After the devotions and brief quotations from the Church Fathers
— all annotated with grammatical or etymological notes in black ink in the margins and between the
lines, and sometimes with critical comments probably added later in the students’ career — the notebooks
progress to the study of certain classical writers.
Gliding her hands over a text in Braille, Helen Keller sits by a window, reading. (photo credit 5.7)
Hofman stressed the grammatical perfection of these texts, but from time to time he was moved to
remind his students that their reading was to be not only studiously analytical but also from the heart.
Because he himself had found beauty and wisdom in those ancient texts, he encouraged his students to
seek, in the words set down by souls long vanished, something that spoke to them personally, in their own
place and time. In 1498, for instance, when they were studying books IV, V and VI of Ovid’s Fasti, and the
year after, when they copied out the opening sections of Virgil’s Bucolics and then the complete Georgics,
a jotted word of praise here and there, an enthusiastic gloss added to the margin, allows us to imagine
that at that precise verse Hofman stopped his students to share his admiration and delight.
The school notebook of the adolescent Beatus Rhenanus, preserved at the Humanist Library in Sélestat.
(photo credit 5.8)
Looking at Gisenheim’s notes, appended to the text in both Latin and German, we can follow the
analytical reading that took place in Hofman’s class. Many of the words Gisenheim wrote in the margins
of his Latin copy are synonyms or translations; at times the note is a specific explanation. For instance,
over the word prognatos the student has written the synonym progenitos, and then explained, in German,
“those who are born from yourself”. Other notes offer the etymology of a word, and its relation to its
German equivalent. A favourite author at Sélestat was Isidore of Seville, the seventh-century theologian
whose Etymologies, a vast work in twenty volumes, explained and discussed the meaning and use of
words. Hofman seems to have been particularly concerned with instructing his students in using words
correctly, being respectful of their meaning and connotations, so that they could interpret or translate
with authority. At the end of the notebooks he had the students compile an Index rerum et verborum
(Index of Things and Words) listing and defining the subjects they had studied, a step which no doubt
gave them a sense of the progress they were making, and tools to use in other readings done on their
own. Certain passages bear Hofman’s comments on the texts. In no case are the words translated
phonetically, which might lead one to suppose that, before copying down a text, Gisenheim, Rhenanus and
the other students had repeated it out loud a sufficient number of times to memorize its pronunciation.

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Nor do the sentences in the notebooks carry stresses, so we don’t know whether Hofman demanded a
certain cadence in the reading or whether this was left to chance. In poetic passages, no doubt, a
standard cadence would be taught, and we can imagine Hofman reading out in a booming voice the
ancient and resonant lines.
The evidence that emerges from these notebooks is that, in the mid-fifteenth century, reading, at least in
a humanist school, was gradually becoming the responsibility of each individual reader. Previous
authorities — translators, commentators, annotators, glossers, cataloguers, anthologists, censors, canon-
makers — had established official hierarchies and ascribed intentions to the different works. Now the
readers were asked to read for themselves, and sometimes to determine value and meaning on their own
in light of those authorities. The change, of course, was not sudden, nor can it be fixed to a single place
and date. As early as the thirteenth century, an anonymous scribe had written in the margins of a
monastic chronicle, “You should make it a habit, when reading books, to attend more to the sense than to
the words, to concentrate on the fruit rather than the foliage.” This sentiment was echoed in Hofman’s
teaching. In Oxford, in Bologna, in Baghdad, even in Paris, the scholastic teaching methods were
questioned and then gradually changed. This was brought on in part by the sudden availability of books
soon after the invention of the printing press, but also by the fact that the somewhat simpler social
structure of previous European centuries, of the Europe of Charlemagne and the later medieval world,
had been economically, politically and intellectually fractured. To the new scholar — to Beatus Rhenanus,
for instance — the world seemed to have lost its stability and grown in bewildering complexity. As if
things weren’t bad enough, in 1543 Copernicus’s controversial treatise De revolutionibus orbium
coelestium (Of the Movement of Heavenly Bodies) was published, which placed the sun at the centre of
the universe — displacing Ptolemy’s Almagest, which had assured the world that the earth and
humankind were at the centre of all creation.
The passage from the scholastic method to more liberated systems of thought brought another
development. Until then, the task of a scholar had been — like that of the teacher — the search for
knowledge, inscribed within certain rules and canons and proven systems of learning; the responsibility
of the teacher had been felt to be a public one, making texts and their different levels of meaning
available to the vastest possible audience, affirming a common social history of politics, philosophy and
faith. After Dringenberg, Hofman and the others, the products of those schools, the new humanists,
abandoned the classroom and the public forum and, like Rhenanus, retired to the closed space of the
study or library, to read and think in private. The teachers of the Latin school at Sélestat passed on
orthodox precepts that implied an established “correct” and common reading but also offered students
the vaster and more personal humanist perspective; the students eventually reacted by circumscribing
the act of reading to their own intimate world and experience and by asserting their authority as
individual readers over every text.
The high school student Franz Kafka, c. 1898. (photo credit 5.9)

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