When I was ten or eleven, one of my teachers in Buenos Aires tutored me in the evenings in German and European history. To improve my German pronunciation, he encouraged me to memorize poems by Heine, Goethe and Schiller, and Gustav Schwab’s ballad “Der Ritter und der Bodensee”, in which a rider gallops across the frozen Lake of Constance and, on realizing what he has accomplished, dies of fright on the far shore. I enjoyed learning the poems but I didn’t understand of what use they might possibly be. “They’ll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,” my teacher said. Then he told me that his father, murdered in Sachsenhausen, had been a famous scholar who knew many of the classics by heart and who, during his time in the concentration camp, had offered himself as a library to be read to his fellow inmates. I imagined the old man in that murky, relentless, hopeless place, approached with a request for Virgil or Euripides, opening himself up to a given page and reciting the ancient words for his bookless readers. Years later, I realized that he had been immortalized as one of the crowd of roaming book-savers in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A text read and remembered becomes, in that redemptive rereading, like the frozen lake in the poem I memorized so long ago — as solid as land and capable of supporting the reader’s crossing, and yet, at the same time, its only existence is in the mind, as precarious and fleeting as if its letters were written on water.
The illustrious reader Beatus Rhenanus, book-collector and editor. (photo credit 4.4)
LEARNING TO READ
eading out loud, reading silently, being able to carry in the mind intimate libraries of remembered words, are astounding abilities that we acquire by uncertain methods. And yet, before these abilities can be acquired, a reader needs to learn the basic craft of recognizing the common signs by which a society has chosen to communicate: in other words, a reader must learn to read. Claude Lévi-Strauss tells how, when he was travelling among the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, his hosts, seeing him write, took his pencil and paper and drew squiggly lines in imitation of his letters and demanded that he “read” what they had written. The Nambikwara expected their scribbles to be as immediately significant to Lévi-Strauss as those he drew himself.1 For Lévi-Strauss, taught to read in a European school, the notion that a system of communication should be immediately comprehensible to any other person seemed absurd. The methods by which we learn to read not only embody the conventions of our particular society regarding literacy — the channelling of information, the hierarchies of knowledge and power — they also determine and limit the ways in which our ability to read is put to use.
I lived for a year in Sélestat, a small French town twenty miles south of Strasbourg, in the middle of the Alsatian plain between the Rhine River and the Vosges Mountains. There, in the small municipal library, are two large handwritten notebooks. One is 300 pages long, the other 480; in both the paper has yellowed over the centuries, but the writing, in different colours of ink, is still surprisingly clear. Later in life, their owners had the notebooks bound in order to preserve them better, but when they were in use they were little more than bundles of folded pages, probably bought at a bookseller’s stall in one of the local markets. Open to the gaze of the library’s visitors, they are — a typed card explains — the notebooks of two of the students who attended the Latin school of Sélestat in the last years of the fifteenth century, from 1477 to 1501: Guillaume Gisenheim, of whose life nothing is known except what his schoolboy’s notebook tells us, and Beatus Rhenanus, who was to become a leading figure in the humanist movement and the editor of many of the works of Erasmus.
In Buenos Aires, in the first few grades, we too had “reading” notebooks, laboriously handwritten and painstakingly illustrated with coloured crayons. Our desks and benches were fixed to each other by cast-iron brackets and set in long rows of two, leading (the symbol of power did not escape us) up to the teacher’s desk, high on a wooden platform, behind which loomed the blackboard. Each desk was pierced to hold a white porcelain inkpot into which we plunged the metal nibs of our pens; we were not allowed to use fountain-pens until grade three. Centuries from now, if some scrupulous librarian were to exhibit those notebooks as precious objects in glass cases, what would a visitor discover? From the patriotic texts copied out in tidy paragraphs, the visitor might deduce that in our education the rhetoric of politics superseded the niceties of literature; from our illustrations, that we learned to transform these texts into slogans (“The Malvinas Belong To Argentina” became two hands linked around a pair of ragged islands; “Our Flag Is The Emblem Of Our Homeland”, three strips of colour blowing in the wind). From the identical glosses the visitor might learn that we were taught to read not for pleasure or for knowledge but merely for instruction. In a country where inflation was to attain a monthly 200 per cent, this was the only way to read the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.
In Sélestat there were several different schools. A Latin school had existed since the fourteenth century, lodged on church property and maintained by both the municipal magistrate and the parish. The original school, the one attended by Gisenheim and Rhenanus, had occupied a house on the Marché-Vert, in front of the eleventh-century church of St. Foy. In 1530 the school had become more prestigious and had moved to a larger building across from the thirteenth-century church of St. George, a two-storey house that carried on its façade an inspiring fresco depicting the nine muses sporting in the sacred fountain of Hippocrene, on Mount Helicon.2 With the transfer of the school, the name of the street changed from Lottengasse to Babilgasse, in reference to the babbling (in Alsatian dialect, bablen, “to babble”) of the students. I lived only a couple of blocks away.
From the beginnings of the fourteenth century, there exist full records of two German schools in Sélestat; then, in 1686, the first French school was opened, thirteen years after Louis XIV took possession of the town. These schools taught reading, writing, singing and a little arithmetic in the vernacular, and were open to all. An admission contract for one of the German schools, around the year 1500, notes that the teacher would instruct “members of the guilds and others from the age of twelve on, as well as those children unable to attend the Latin school, boys as well as girls.”3 Unlike those attending the German schools, students were admitted to the Latin school at the age of six, and remained there until they were ready for university at thirteen or fourteen. A few became assistants to the teacher and stayed on until the age of twenty.
Though Latin continued to be the language of bureaucracy, ecclesiastical affairs and scholarship in most of Europe until well into the seventeenth century, by the early sixteenth century the vernacular languages were gaining ground. In 1521, Martin Luther began publication of his German Bible; in 1526, William Tyndale brought out his English translation of the Bible in Cologne and Worms, having been forced to leave England under threat of death; in 1530, in both Sweden and Denmark, a government decree prescribed that the Bible was to be read in church in the vernacular. In Rhenanus’s days, however, the prestige and official use of Latin continued not only in the Catholic Church, where priests were required to conduct services in Latin, but also in universities such as the Sorbonne, which Rhenanus wished to attend. Latin schools were therefore still in great demand.
Schools, Latin and otherwise, provided a certain degree of order in the chaotic existence of students in the late Middle Ages. Because scholarship was seen as the seat of a “third power” positioned between the Church and the State, students were granted a number of official privileges from the twelfth century on. In 1158, the German Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa exempted them from the jurisdiction of secular authorities except in serious criminal cases, and guaranteed them safe conduct when travelling. A privilege accorded by King Philippe Auguste of France in 1200 forbade the Provost of Paris to imprison them under any excuse. And from Henry III onwards, each English monarch guaranteed secular immunity to the students at Oxford.4
To attend school, students had to pay tax-fees, and they
were taxed according to their bursa, a unit based on their weekly bed and board. If they were unable to pay, they had to swear that they were “without means of support” and sometimes they were granted fellowships assured by subventions. In the fifteenth century, poor students accounted for 18 per cent of the student body in Paris, 25 per cent in Vienna and 19 per cent in Leipzig.5 Privileged but penniless, anxious to preserve their rights but uncertain about how to make a living, thousands of students roamed the land, living off alms and larceny. A few survived by pretending to be fortune-tellers or magicians, selling miraculous trinkets, announcing eclipses or catastrophes, conjuring up spirits, predicting the future, teaching prayers to rescue souls from purgatory, giving out recipes to guard crops against hail and cattle against disease. Some claimed to be descendants of the Druids and boasted that they had entered the Mountain of Venus, where they had been initiated into the secret arts; as a sign of this, they wore capes of yellow netting over their shoulders. Many went from town to town following an older cleric whom they served and from whom they sought instruction; the teacher was known as a bacchante (not from “Bacchus” but from the verb bacchari, “to roam”), and his disciples were called Schützen (protectors) in German or bejaunes (dunces) in French. Only those who were determined to become clerics or to enter some form of civil service would seek the means to leave the road and enter a learning establishment6 like the Latin school in Sélestat.
The students who attended the Latin school in Sélestat came from different parts of Alsace and Lorraine, and even farther, from Switzerland. Those who belonged to rich bourgeois or noble families (as was the case with Beatus Rhenanus) could choose to be lodged in the boarding-house run by the rector and his wife, or to stay as paying guests at the house of their private tutor, or even at one of the local inns.7 But those who had sworn that they were too poor to pay their fees had great difficulties in finding room and board. The Swiss Thomas Platter, who arrived at the school in 1495 at the age of eighteen “knowing nothing, unable even to read [the best-known of medieval grammar primers, the Ars de octo partibus orationis by Aelius] Donat”, and who felt, among the younger students, “like a hen among the chicks”, described in his autobiography how he and a friend had set off in search of instruction. “When we reached Strasbourg, we found many poor students there, who told us that the school was not good, but that there was an excellent school in Sélestat. We set off for Sélestat. On the way we met a nobleman who asked us, ‘Where are you going?’ When he heard that we were headed for Sélestat, he advised us against it, telling us that there were many poor students in that town and that the inhabitants were far from rich. Hearing this, my companion burst into bitter tears, crying, ‘Where can we go?’ I comforted him by saying, ‘Rest assured, if some can find the means of obtaining food in Sélestat, I’ll certainly manage to do so for both of us.’ ” They managed to stay in Sélestat for a few months, but after Pentecost “new students arrived from all parts, and I no longer was able to find food for both of us, and we left for the town of Soleure.”8
In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication. The child learning to read is admitted into the communal memory by way of books, and thereby becomes acquainted with a common past which he or she renews, to a greater or lesser degree, in every reading. In medieval Jewish society, for instance, the ritual of learning to read was explicitly celebrated. On the Feast of Shavuot, when Moses received the Torah from the hands of God, the boy about to be initiated was wrapped in a prayer shawl and taken by his father to the teacher. The teacher sat the boy on his lap and showed him a slate on which were written the Hebrew alphabet, a passage from the Scriptures and the words “May the Torah be your occupation.” The teacher read out every word and the child repeated it. Then the slate was covered with honey and the child licked it, thereby bodily assimilating the holy words. Also, biblical verses were written on peeled hard-boiled eggs and on honey cakes, which the child would eat after reading the verses out loud to the teacher.9
Though it is difficult to generalize over several centuries and across so many countries, in the Christian society of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance learning to read and write — outside the Church — was the almost exclusive privilege of the aristocracy and (after the thirteenth century) the upper bourgeoisie. Even though there were aristocrats and grands bourgeois who considered reading and writing menial tasks suitable only for poor clerics,10 most boys and quite a few girls born to these classes were taught their letters very early. The child’s nurse, if she could read, initiated the teaching, and for that reason had to be chosen with utmost care, since she was not only to provide milk but also to ensure correct speech and pronunciation.11 The great Italian humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti, writing between 1435 and 1444, noted that “the care of very young children is women’s work, for nurses or the mother,”12 and that at the earliest possible age they should be taught the alphabet. Children learned to read phonetically by repeating letters pointed out by their nurse or mother in a hornbook or alphabet sheet. (I myself was taught this way, by my nurse reading out to me the bold-type letters from an old English picture-book; I was made to repeat the sounds again and again.) The image of the teaching mother-figure was as common in Christian iconography as the female student was rare in depictions of the classroom. There are numerous representations of Mary holding a book in front of the Child Jesus, and of Anne teaching Mary, but neither Christ nor His Mother was depicted as learning to write or actually writing; it was the notion of Christ reading the Old Testament that was considered essential to make the continuity of the Scriptures explicit.
Two fifteenth-century mothers teaching their children to read: left, the Virgin and Child; right, Saint Anne with the young Mary. (photo credit 5.1)
Quintilian, a first-century Roman lawyer from northern Spain who became the tutor of the Emperor Domitian’s grand-nephews, wrote a twelve-volume pedagogical manual, the Institutio oratoria, which was highly influential throughout the Renaissance. In it, he advised: “Some hold that boys should not be taught to read till they are seven years old, that being the earliest age at which they can derive profit from instruction and endure the strain of learning. Those however who hold that a child’s mind should not be allowed to lie fallow for a moment are wiser. Chrysippus, for instance, though he gives the nurses a three years’ reign, still holds the formation of the child’s mind on the best principles to be a part of their duties. Why, again, since children are capable of moral training, should they not be capable of literary education?”13
After the letters had been learned, male teachers would be brought in as private tutors (if the family could afford them) for the boys, while the mother busied herself with the education of the girls. Even though, by the fifteenth century, most wealthy houses had the space, quiet and equipment to provide teaching at home, most scholars recommended that boys be educated away from the family, in the company of other boys; on the other hand, medieval moralists hotly debated the benefits of education — public or private — for girls. “It is not appropriate for girls to learn to read and write unless they wish to become nuns, since they might otherwise, coming of age, write or receive amorous missives,”14 warned the nobleman Philippe de Novare, but several of his contemporaries disagreed. “Girls should learn to read in order to learn the true faith and protect themselves from the perils that menace their soul,” argued the Chevalier de la Tour Landry.15 Girls born in richer households were often sent to school to learn reading and writing, usually to prepare them for the convent. In the aristocratic households of Europe, it was possible to find women who were fully literate.
Before the mid-fifteenth century, the teaching at the Latin school of Sélestat had been rudimentary and undistinguished, following the conventional precepts of the scholastic tradition. Developed mainly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by philosophers for whom “thinking is a craft with me
ticulously fixed laws”,16 scholasticism proved a useful method for reconciling the precepts of religious faith with the arguments of human reason, resulting in a concordia discordantium or “harmony among differing opinions” which could then be used as a further point of argument. Soon, however, scholasticism became a method of preserving rather than eliciting ideas. In Islam it served to establish the official dogma; since there were no Islamic councils or synods set up for this purpose, the concordia discordantium, the opinion that survived all objections, became orthodoxy.17 In the Christian world, though varying considerably from university to university, scholasticism adamantly followed the precepts of Aristotle by way of early Christian philosophers such as the fifth-century Boethius, whose De consolatione philosophiae (which Alfred the Great translated into English) was a great favourite throughout the Middle Ages. Essentially, the scholastic method consisted in little more than training the students to consider a text according to certain pre-established, officially approved criteria which were painstakingly and painfully drilled into them. As far as the teaching of reading was concerned, the success of the method depended more on the students’ perseverance than on their intelligence. Writing in the mid-thirteenth century, the learned Spanish king Alfonso el Sabio belaboured the point: “Well and truly must the teachers show their learning to the students by reading to them books and making them understand to the best of their abilities; and once they begin to read, they must continue the teaching until they have come to the end of the books they have started; and while in health they must not send for others to read in their place, unless they are asking someone else to read in order to show him honour, and not to avoid the task of reading.”18
A History of Reading Page 8
