Illich on 12th Century Innovations in Writing and Reading


In his extraordinary little 1993 book In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon , the social critic and Medieval historian Ivan Illich reviews the radical changes in the creation of written texts (and in readers’ relations with them) which occurred in the course of the 1100's. Most of what we think of as obvious about writings was invented or began to be wide-spread in that era: book titles, spacing between words, punctuation, paragraphing, chaptering, indexing, and more (note that most of these are changes in "technology", on the face of them). Latin, the only written language in the West, had been written without spaces between the words, which made oral reading a near-necessity: reading meant speaking and hearing (social and sensual activities), and it was a kind of chant whose intent was to induce in the hearers a state of inspired contemplation. Illich refers to this as “monastic reading”, as contrasted with the later “scholastic reading”, which was silent, individual, and selective.  Reading and writing came to be associated with scholars (whose activities were rather like those of clerks) rather than with monks. Two major implications of Illich’s commentary are not fully addressed here: that we are witnessing the groundwork for the idea of  “a language”, and for a very new concept of the “self.” What's clear, however, is the connection of reading to vision. (Pieces from pages 95-6, 70-2, 75, 82, & 88.


          From the trace of utterance to the mirror of concept
    Before Hugh's generation, the book is a record of the author's speech or dictation. After Hugh, increasingly it becomes a repertory of the author's thought, a screen onto which one projects still unvoiced intentions.
    As a young man, Hugh was introduced to monastic reading. He mainly listened to the book. He listened when he read it to himself,  when he chanted the responses in choir, when he attended a lecture in the chapter room. Hugh wrote a treatise on the art of reading for people who would listen to the sound of the lines. But he composed his book at the end of an epoch; those who actually used the Didascalicon during the next four centuries no longer read with tongue and ear. They were trained in new ways: the shapes on the pages for them became less triggers for sound patterns than visual symbols of concepts. They were literate in a "scholastic" rather than “monastic" way. They no longer approached the book as a vineyard, a garden, or the landscape for an adventuresome pilgrimage. The book connoted for them much more the treasury, the mine, the storage room--the scrutable text.
    In Hugh's generation...if anyone thumbs through [a book] hoping to find a certain passage, there exists little more chance of happening upon it than if the book had been opened randomly. But after Hugh the book can be entered randomly, with a good chance of finding what one looks for. It is still a manuscript, not a printed book, but technically it is already a substantially different object. The flow of narration has been sliced up into paragraphs whose sum total now makes up the new book.
    What this meant can be illustrated by an experience known to most of us today. Until the late 1970's, musical records could be replayed, but there was no sure and easy way of access to a specific passage. By the late 1980's not only elapsed-time counters, but also index numbers to identify movements, operatic scenes, and so on, had become standard features on audio players, enabling random access. In a similar way, the book for the monastic reader was a discourse which you could follow, but into which you could not easily dip at a point of your choosing. Only after Hugh does easy access to a specific place become a standard procedure.
    Before Hugh, old books grew by mere accretion. During Hugh's lifetime, editing starts; ...all known commentaries of Church Fathers on the Bible, verse by verse, are assembled; Abaelard gathers contrasting opinions on the same theological issue. Tradition is cannibalized and compiled according to the new editors' whim.
    After Hugh's death, students begin to use these compilations. A new kind of reader comes into existence, one who wants to acquire in a few years of study a new kind of acquaintance with a larger number of authors than a meditating monk could have perused in a lifetime. These new demands are both stimulated and met by new reference tools. Their existence and use is profoundly new. And once these tools are invented they remain fundamentally unchanged until the text composer program of the 1980's. A mutation of comparable depth begins only then.
    These shifts from the recording of speech to the recording of  thought, from the record of wisdom to the record of knowledge, from the transmission of authorities inherited out of the past to the storage of promptly usable, well-coined “knowledge” can of course be understood as a reflection of a new mentality and economy during the twelfth century. The changes in literate technique can be viewed as a response of the clerical trades to the demands of princes, lawyers, and merchants. But... [h]ow did the use of new techniques foster new ways of  conceiving reality?...
    The student used to Latin learned his words from the traces that the stylus left in the beeswax he had smoothed on his writing tablet before class. The teacher pronounced each syllable separately, and the pupils repeated in a chorus of syllables and words. As the teacher dictates to the pupil, the pupil dictates to his own hand. The deogratias which was a familiar utterance now takes on the shape of two successive words. The single words of Latin impress themselves as a sequence of syllables on the ear of the pupil. They become part of his sense of touch, which remembers how the hand moved to cut them in the wax. They appear as visible traces which impress themselves on the sense of sight. Lips and ears, hands and eyes conspire in shaping the pupil's memory for the Latin words. No modern language is taught through such an intense use of psychomotor memory traces left in the hand and eye as a result of writing.
    When we think of the alphabet, we see in it a tool for recording speech sounds. For one and a half thousand years this simply was not so. The letters, which without any change in form and number have proven their capacity to encode hundreds of different languages, were for this long time used for one exclusive purpose: writing Latin. But not Latin as it was spoken; rather, as it was alphabetized during the last centuries B.C. During the 650 years when Rome governed the Mediterranean world, not one of the tongues of the conquered and governed peoples was ever recorded in Roman letters. The monopoly of Latin over the Roman alphabet was so absolute that it has never been viewed as the result of a “taboo,” and has never been considered as a surprising historical anomaly. This neglect of an available technology seems as impressive as the neglect of the wheel in pre-Columbian cultures, where only gods and playthings were ever put on a carriage. The monopoly of Latin over the Roman  letters, and equally of Greek over the Greek alphabet, was anchored in deep assumptions about the relation of shape and sound. When Cyril and Methodius, around 850, [translated] the Greek Bible for the Bulgarians, they also devised a new alphabet. They never thought of enlarging the Greek alphabet with a few signs needed to record Slavonic sounds.
    This neglect of available tools in the face of unaccustomed tasks is even more startling if one considers that the Roman alphabet was not even used to write the Latin which people actually spoke. Starting with the first century A.D., the dialects spoken by Roman legionaries settled in Gallia and Hispania had ceased to sound like that spoken in their homes in Latium or Campania. And even here, in the native regions of Latin, the orthographic conventions of 300 B.C. no longer reflected the cadences and sounds which people actually used when they spoke. During this entire period--from antiquity to Hugh's lifetime--and in the vast and politically differentiated area from the Black Sea to Spain, the Roman alphabet was not used to write down what people said in ordinary speech. Until the thirteenth century, it remained essentially a tool at the service of formal dictation.
    Only after Hugh's death--and then quite suddenly--does the alphabet begin to be used by chroniclers and notaries to record actual speech. A recording device available for so long, and known by people born into languages distinct from Latin, was only now routinely used to fix these in written form. From the point of view of the historian of technology, this is a privileged instance to test fundamental hypotheses. Instead of confirming the theory that tasks become possible when the tools to perform them become available, or the other which says that tools are created when tasks come to be socially desirable, this use of the ABC suggests that an eminently suitable and complex artificial device already available within a society will be turned into a tool for the performance of a task only at that historic moment when this task acquires symbolic significance. The page had to give birth to the visible text, the “faithful” had to give birth to the moral self and the legal person before the dialect spoken by that person could be visualized as “a” language.

    Reading, for Hugh, is a moral rather than a technical activity. It is at the service of personal fulfillment. Hugh is as much concerned with how to support the well-intentioned blockhead as to prevent the vain from rotting....

    ....As the leaf in the book of civilization is turned from the monastic to the scholastic page, a radical change takes place also in the reader: his social status before and after the turn is not the same. The monastic reader--chanter or mumbler--picks the words from the lines and creates a public social auditory ambience. All those who, with the reader, are immersed in this hearing milieu are equals before the sound. It makes no difference who reads, as it makes no difference who rings the bell. Lectio divina is always a liturgical act, coram, in the face of, someone-- God, angels, or anyone within earshot....
    Fifty years after Hugh, typically, this was no longer true. The technical activity of deciphering no longer creates an auditory and, therefore, a social space. The reader then flips through the pages. His eyes mirror the two-dimensional page. Soon he will conceive of his own mind in analogy with a manuscript. Reading will become an individualistic activity, intercourse between a self and a page.