Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

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.” 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, and its reading occupies
the three following chapters, while everyone feels free to interrupt and comment at will.
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.”
“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.”
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. 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