A History of Reading
Page 9
Two school scenes from the turn of the fifteenth century showing the hierarchical relationship between teachers and students: left, Aristotle and his disciples; right, an anonymous class. (photo credit 5.2)
Well into the sixteenth century, the scholastic method was prevalent in universities and in parish, monastic and cathedral schools throughout Europe. These schools, the ancestors of the Latin school of Sélestat, had begun to develop in the fourth and fifth centuries after the decline of the Roman educational system, and had flourished in the ninth, when Charlemagne ordered all cathedrals and churches to provide schools for training clerics in the arts of reading, writing, chant and calculus. In the tenth century, when the resurgence of the towns made it essential to have centres of basic learning, schools established themselves around the figure of a particularly gifted teacher on whom the school’s fame then depended.
A scene from an early sixteenth-century school in France. (photo credit 5.3)
A teacher continues his lesson beyond the grave, his craft commemorated on a mid-fourteenth-century Bolognese tomb. (photo credit 5.4)
The physical aspect of the schools did not change much from the times of Charlemagne. Classes were conducted in a large room. The teacher usually sat at an elevated lectern, or sometimes at a table, on an ordinary bench (chairs did not become common in Christian Europe until the fifteenth century). A marble sculpture from a Bolognese tomb, from the mid-fourteenth century, shows a teacher seated on a bench, a book open on the desk in front of him, looking out at his students. He is holding a page open with his left hand, while his right hand seems to be stressing a point, perhaps explaining the passage he has just read out loud. Most illustrations show the students sitting on benches, holding lined pages or wax tablets for taking notes, or standing around the teacher with open books. One signboard advertising a school in 1516 depicts two adolescent students working on a bench, hunched over their texts, while on the right a woman seated at a lectern is guiding a much younger child by pointing a finger at a page; on the left a student, probably in his early teens, stands at a lectern, reading from an open book, while the teacher behind him holds a bundle of birches to his buttocks. The birch, as much as the book, would be the teacher’s emblem for many centuries.
A signboard advertising a school, painted in 1516 by Ambrosius Holbein. (photo credit 5.5)
In the Latin school of Sélestat, students were first taught to read and write, and later learned the subjects of the trivium: grammar above all, rhetoric and dialectics. Since not all students arrived with a knowledge of their letters, reading would begin with an ABC or primer and collections of simple prayers such as the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary and Apostles’ Creed. After this rudimentary learning, the students were taken through several reading manuals common in most medieval schools: Donat’s Ars de octo partibus orationis, the Doctrinale puerorum by the Franciscan monk Alexandre de Villedieu and the Handbook of Logic by Peter the Spaniard. Few students were rich enough to buy books,19 and often only the teacher possessed these expensive volumes. He would copy the complicated rules of grammar onto the blackboard — usually without explaining them, since, according to scholastic pedagogy, understanding was not a requisite of knowledge. The students were then forced to learn the rules by heart. As might be expected, the results were often disappointing.20 One of the students who attended the Sélestat Latin school in the early 1450s, Jakob Wimpfeling (who was to become, like Rhenanus, one of the most noted humanists of his age), commented years later that those who had studied under the old system “could neither speak Latin nor compose a letter or a poem, nor even explain one of the prayers used at Mass.”21 Several factors made reading difficult for a novice. As we have seen, punctuation was still erratic in the fifteenth century, and upper-case letters were used inconsistently. Many words were abbreviated, sometimes by the student hastening to take notes, but often as the common manner of writing out a word — perhaps to save paper — so the reader not only had to be able to read phonetically but also had to recognize what the abbreviation stood for. Finally, spelling was not uniform; the same word could appear under several different guises.22
An illuminated miniature showing a teacher ready to punish his student, in a late fifteenth-century French translation of Aristotle’s Politics. (photo credit 5.6)
Following the scholastic method, students were taught to read through orthodox commentaries that were the equivalent of our potted lecture notes. The original texts — whether those of the Church Fathers or, to a far lesser extent, those of the ancient pagan writers — were not to be apprehended directly by the student but to be reached through a series of preordained steps. First came the lectio, a grammatical analysis in which the syntactic elements of each sentence would be identified; this would lead to the littera or literal sense of the text. Through the littera the student acquired the sensus, the meaning of the text according to different established interpretations. The process ended with an exegesis — the sententia — in which the opinions of approved commentators were discussed.23 The merit of such a reading lay not in discovering a private significance in the text but in being able to recite and compare the interpretations of acknowledged authorities, and thus becoming “a better man”. With these notions in mind, the fifteenth-century professor of rhetoric Lorenzo Guidetti summed up the purpose of teaching proper reading: “For when a good teacher undertakes to explicate any passage, the object is to train his pupils to speak eloquently and to live virtuously. If an obscure phrase crops up which serves neither of these ends but is readily explicable, then I am in favour of his explaining it. If its sense is not immediately obvious, I will not consider him negligent if he fails to explicate it. But if he insists on digging out trivia which require much time and effort to be expended in their explication, I shall call him merely pedantic.”24
In 1441, Jean de Westhus, priest of the Sélestat parish and the local magistrate, decided to appoint a graduate of Heidelberg University — Louis Dringenberg — to the post of director of the school. Inspired by the contemporary humanist scholars who were questioning the traditional instruction in Italy and The Netherlands, and whose extraordinary influence was gradually reaching France and Germany, Dringenberg introduced fundamental changes. He kept the old reading manuals of Donat and Alexandre, but made use of only certain sections of their books, which he opened for discussion in class; he explained the rules of grammar, rather than merely forcing his students to memorize them; he discarded the traditional commentaries and glosses, which he found did “not help students to acquire an elegant language”,25 and worked instead with the classic texts of the Church Fathers themselves. By largely disregarding the conventional stepping-stones of the scholastic annotators, and by allowing the class to discuss the texts being taught (while still maintaining a strict guiding hand over the discussions), Dringenberg granted his students a greater degree of reading freedom than they had ever known before. He was not afraid of what Guidetti dismissed as “trivia”. When he died in 1477, the basis for a new manner of teaching children to read had been firmly established in Sélestat.26
Dringenberg’s successor was Crato Hofman, also a graduate of Heidelberg, a twenty-seven-year-old scholar whose students remembered him as “joyfully strict and strictly joyful”,27 who was quite ready to use the cane on anyone not sufficiently dedicated to the study of letters. If Dringenberg had concentrated his efforts on acquainting his students with the Church Fathers’ texts, Hofman preferred the Roman and Greek classics.28 One of his students noted that, like Dringenberg, “Hofman abhorred the old commentaries and glosses”;29 rather than take the class through a morass of grammatical rules, he proceeded very quickly to the reading of the texts themselves, adding to them a wealth of archeological, geographical and historical anecdotes. Another student recalled that, after Hofman had guided them through the works of Ovid, Cicero, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Antonius Sabellicus and others, they reached the university “perfectly fluent in Latin and with a profound knowledge of grammar
”.30 Although calligraphy, “the art of writing beautifully”, was never neglected, the ability to read fluently, accurately and intelligently, deftly “milking the text for every drop of sense”, was for Hofman the utmost priority.
But even in Hofman’s class, the texts were never left entirely open to the students’ chance interpretation. On the contrary, they were systematically and rigorously dissected; from the copied words a moral was extracted, as well as politeness, civility, faith and warnings against vices — every sort of social precept, in fact, from table manners to the pitfalls of the seven deadly sins. “A teacher,” wrote a contemporary of Hofman’s, “must not only teach reading and writing, but also Christian virtues and morals; he must strive to seed the child’s soul with virtue; this is important, because, as Aristotle says, a man behaves in later life according to the education he has received; all habits, especially good habits, having taken root in a man during his youth, cannot afterwards be uprooted.”31
The Sélestat notebooks of Rhenanus and Gisenheim begin with Sunday prayers and selections from the Psalms which the students would copy from the blackboard on the first day of class. These they probably already knew by heart; in copying them out mechanically — not yet knowing how to read — they would have associated the series of words with the sound of the memorized lines, as in the “global” method for teaching reading laid out two centuries later by Nicolas Adam in his A Trustworthy Method of Learning Any Language Whatsoever: “When you show a child an object, a dress for instance, has it ever occurred 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.”32
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.”33 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. 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.”34 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 w
orld, 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.35
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)