READING MATTERS

Halldorf, a Swedish scholar, offers a history of reading in the West, but his book is really about the place of literacy in the history of faith. Beginning with the preaching of Jesus, he traces how religious authority moved from the moment of oral performance to the immutability of the written word. The scrolls of ancient Rome gave way to the codex, the bound book as we know it today, largely through the influence of Christian scripture. It was the monks, we then learn, who effectively saved civilization in the Middle Ages. Reading aloud, the standard social practice for centuries, was followed by reading silently during the early Modern period, enabling a new intimacy with texts and a new sense of human interiority. The Reformation came through the new medium of print. Translating the Bible into European vernaculars and empowering individual Christians to find a meaning in the text worked together to change radically relationships between the word of God and words of men. Today, digital technology has increasingly replaced hard print as the medium of communication. Halldorf concludes with an argument for “resonant reading”—engaging privately with a text, taking pleasure, opening the self to the imaginary, and fostering the closest thing we have, in this secular world, to prayer. “To enjoy beauty, we need to be attentive.” Originally published in Swedish in 2023, the book covers ground familiar to scholars from the work of Robert Darnton, Alberto Manguel, Anthony Grafton, and a host of book historians. For those new to the subject, though, it is a lucid introduction to reading with the spirit as well as with the eye.

A welcome history of reading as a story of faith in the word and the self.