1. Hamilton 1
A History of Reading
Reading Notes
ELAN 8005
Buffy Hamilton
June 2005
“The Last Page”
“We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse
what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to
understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as
breathing, is our essential function” (7).
“You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their
lines and, reopening them after an interval, surprised yourself at
the spot where you had halted” (12).
“Implicit in the possession of a book is the history of the book‟s
previous readings---that is to say, every new reader is affected by
what he or she imagines the book to have been in previous hands”
(16).
“A book brings its own history to the reader” (16).
“…reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression:
each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before”
(19).
“But not only totalitarian governments fear reading. Readers are
bullied in schoolyards and in locker rooms as much as in
government offices and prisons. Almost everywhere, the
community of readers has an ambiguous reputation that comes
from its acquired authority and perceived power. Something in the
relationship between a reader and a book is recognized as wise and
fruitful, but it is also seen as disdainfully exclusive and
excluding…”(21).
“Reality---harsh, necessary reality---was seen to conflict
irredeemably with the evasive dream world of books. With this
excuse, and with increasing effect, the artificial dichotomy between
life and reading is actively encouraged by those in power. Demotic
regimes demand that we forget, and therefore they brand books as
superfluous luxuries” (21).
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

2. Hamilton 2
“Reading Shadows”
“…the human body was already capable of the acts of writing and
reading that still lay in the future; that is to say, the body was able
to store, recall, and decipher all manner of sensations, including the
arbitrary signs of written language yet to be invented” (35).
“In that sense, the words spoken (and later on, the words read)
belong neither to us nor to our parent, to our authors; they occupy
a space of shared meaning, a communal threshold which lies at the
beginning of our relationship to the arts of conversation and
reading” (35).
“Much of the same can be said of reading: following the text, the
reader utters its meaning through a vastly entangled method of
learned experiences, social conventions, previous readings,
personal experience and private taste” (35).
“Reading, then is not an automatic process of capturing a text in
the way photosensitive paper captures light, but a bewildering,
labyrinthine, common and yet personal process of reconstruction”
(39).
“…the role of readers is to render visible…that which writing
suggests in hints and shadows”(39).
“The Silent Readers”
“But with silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an
unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words
no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce
them”(50).
“…the text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the
reader‟s own possession, the reader‟s intimate knowledge whether
in the busy scriptorium, the market-place or the home”(51).
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

3. Hamilton 3
“The Book of Memory”
“….memory, which enabled him to compose and recompose texts which
he had once read and learned by heart” (56-57).
“By recalling a text, by bringing to mind a book once held in the hands,
such a reader can become the book, from which he and others can
read”(57).
“It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as thought
they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say,
from a wish to know more, they go on telling you the same thing over and
over again forever”(59).
“Interpretation, exegesis, gloss, commentary, association, refutation,
symbolic and allegorical sense, all rose not from the text itself but from
the reader”(59).
“…neither using the book as a prop for thought, nor trusting it as one
would trust the authority of a sage, but taking from it an idea, a phrase,
an image, linking it to another culled from a distant text preserved in
memory, tying the whole together with reflections of one‟s own----
producing, in fact, a new text authored by the reader”(63).
(Petrarch) and concept of “divine truth”: “… a sense which the
reader must possess, must be blessed with, to pick and choose and
interpret his way through the temptations of the page. Even the
author‟s intentions, when surmised, are not of any particular value
in judging a text. This, Petrarch suggests, must be done through
one‟s own recollection of other readings, into which flows the
memory which the author set down on the page. In this dynamic
process of give and take, of pulling part and piecing together, the
reader must not exceed the ethical boundaries of truth---whatever
the reader‟s conscience (we would say common sense) dictates
these to be” (64).
“This light shines differently on all of us, and differently also at the
various stages of our lives. We never return to the same book or
even to the same page, because in the varying light we change and
the book changes, and our memories grow bright and run dim and
bright again, and we never know exactly what it is we remember.
What is certain is that the act of reading, which rescues so many
voices from the past, preserves them sometimes well into the
future, where we may be able to make use of them in brave and
unexpected ways” (64).
“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”(65).
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

4. Hamilton 4
“Learning to Read”
“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”(71).
Learning to read and write---privilege and exclusive of aristocracy
(p. 71).
pp. 72-77---Church as sponsor of literacy
“…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”(82).
“The Missing First Page”
“…we were in agreement with him that no reading can ever be
final” (86).
“If, in reading, there was no such thing as „the last word‟, then no
authority could impose a „correct‟ reading on us. With time we
realized that some readings were better than others---more
informed, more lucid, more challenging, more pleasurable, more
disturbing. But the newly discovered sense of freedom never left
us, and even now, enjoying a book which a certain reviewer has
condemned or casting aside another which has been hotly praised, I
think I can recall that rebellious feeling quite vividly”(86).
“Picture Reading”
p. 97---reading pictures/images as words or like a book---illiterate
and poor in the church
“For the illiterate, excluded from the realm of the written word,
seeing the sacred texts represented in a book in images they could
recognize or “read” must have induced a feeling of belonging of
sharing with the wise and powerful the material presence of God‟s
word”(107).
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

5. Hamilton 5
“Being Read To”
pp. 109---114---Cuban readers being read aloud to as a form of
empowerment and threat to authority.
Middle Ages (p. 116)---reading aloud was a necessity as many
people did not own books
“Being read to for the pleasure of purifying the body, being read to
for pleasure, being read to for instruction or to grant the sounds
supremacy over the senses, both enrich and diminish the act of
reading. Allowing someone else to speak the words on a page for
us is an experience far less personal than holding the book and
following the text with our own eyes” (123).
“The Shape of the Book”
“From the very beginning, readers demanded books in format
adapted to their intended use” (125).
“Since much of the life of Europeans in the Middle Ages was spent
in religious offices, it is hardly surprising that one of the most
popular books of time was the personal prayer-book, or Book of
Hours, which was commonly represented in depictions of the
Annunciation”(129).
“The effects of Gutenberg‟s invention were immediate and
extraordinarily far-reaching, for almost at once many readers
realized its great advantages: speed, uniformity of texts and
relative cheapness”(134).
“It is interesting to note how often a technological development---
such a Gutenberg‟s---promotes rather than eliminates that which it
is supposed to supersede, making us aware of old-fashioned virtues
we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as of
negligible importance”(135).
“Since these books (pocket octavos) were cheaper than
manuscripts, especially illuminated ones, and since an identical
replacement could be purchased if a copy was lost or damaged,
they became, in the eye of the new readers, less symbols of
wealthier than of intellectual aristocracy, and essential tools for
study”(137).
“Private Reading”
“I too read in bed”(150).
“Life happened because I turned the pages”(151).
“…not only do certain books demand a contrast between their
contents and their surroundings; some books seem to demand
particular positions for reading, postures of the reader‟s body that
in turn require reading places appropriate to those postures. Often
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

6. Hamilton 6
the pleasure derived from reading largely depends on the bodily
comfort of the reading”(151).
“Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as
books read in the attic or the kitchen”(152).
“One can transform a place by reading in it”(152).
“But there is something other than entertainment which one derives
from reading in bed: a particular quality of privacy. Reading in bed
is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social
conventions, invisible to the world, and one that because it takes
place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness,
has something of the thrill of thing forbidden”(153).
p. 157---books as sign of social standing, valuable items
“Metaphors of Reading”
pp. 165-66----the subscription to a circulating library as an
important event in Whitman‟s life
“The place of reading, as Whitman suggests, is important, not only
because it provides a physical setting for the text being read, but
because it suggests, by juxtaposing itself with the place on the
page, that both share the same hermeneutic quality, both tempting
the reader with the challenge of elucidation”(166).
“Here he began developing his notion of democracy as society of
“free reader”, untainted by fanaticism and political schools, whom
the text-maker---poet, printer, teacher, newspaper editor—must
serve empathically”(167). {Refers to Whitman}
“For Whitman, the text, author, reader, and world mirrored each
other in the act of reading, an act whose meaning he expanded
until it served to define every vital human activity, as well as the
universe in which it took place. In this conjunction, the reader
reflects the writer (he and I are one), the world echoes a book
(God‟s book, Nature‟s book), which through a literary
transubstantiation become mine), the world is a book to be
deciphered (the writers‟ poems‟ become my reading of the world).
All his life, Whitman seems to have sought an understanding and
definition of the act of reading, which is both itself and the
metaphor for all its parts)”(168).
Whitman felt our duty was to tread the world; human beings (made
in image of God) are also books to be read (169).
“Reading---as we have seen---serves as a metaphoric vehicle, but
in order to be understood must itself be recognized through
metaphors”(170).
“However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and
reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a
reader who is a letter in the world‟s text; thus a circular metaphor
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

7. Hamilton 7
is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read.
The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman
argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a
superficial level, grasping certain meaning and conscious of certain
facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously text and reader
become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every
time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it,
simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven‟t
yet grasped. That is why {as Whitman believed} no reading can
ever be definitive”(173).
“Beginnings”
“The primordial relationship between writer and reader presents a
wonderful paradox: in creating the role of the reader, the writer
also decrees the writer‟s death, since in order for a text to be
finished, the writer must withdraw, cease to exist. While the writer
remains present, the text remains incomplete. Only when the
writer relinquishes the text, does the text come into existence. AT
that point, the existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until
the moment in which a reader reads it. All writing depends on the
generosity of the reader”(179).
180---184---power of those who could write
“Ordainers of the Universe”
History of libraries and importance in society---ancient influences…
“memory of the world” (189).
“The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the
categories in which that reading itself is placed---the learned social
and political categories, and the physical categories into which a
library is divided---constantly modify one another in ways that
appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less
imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every
chosen category implies an exclusion (197-198).
“Categories are exclusive; reading is not---or should not be.
Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes
the act of reading, and forces the reader---the curious reader, the
alert reader---to rescue the book from the category to which it has
been condemned” (199).
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

8. Hamilton 8
“Reading the Future”
“Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words into a message
that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the
text itself or to its author. This transmigration of meaning can enlarge
or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the text with the
circumstances of the reader. Through ignorance, through faith,
through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through
illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the
original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the
very act of bringing it into being”(211).
“The Symbolic Reader”
Women as victims of the sponsors of literacy
Women‟s literacy as a threat to dominant power structure
God‟s Word=law=authority/power
“The attribute of wisdom, now usurped from the female deity,
became exemplified in the vast and ancient iconography depicting
Christ as a book-bearer”(221).
“Reading Within Walls”
“The notion that certain books are intended for the eyes of certain
groups only is almost as ancient as literature itself”(226).
“Setting aside a group of books or genre for a specific group of
readers not only creates an enclosed literary space which those
readers are encouraged to explore; it also, quite often, makes that
space off limits for others”(228).
“To venture into the literature society sets aside, condescendingly,
for a “less privileged” or “less accepted” group is to risk being
tainted by association, since the same caution did not apply to my
cousin who could trespass into the green series without provoking
any more comment than a quip from her mother about her “eclectic
tastes”(228).
“…a bookstore today carries not only the books marketed for
women by outside commercial interests, to determine and limit that
which a woman should read, but also the books created from within
the group, in which women write for themselves that which is
absent in the official texts”(235).
“Stealing Books”
“…I wonder…why I keep so many books that I know I will not read
again”(237).
“I delight in knowing that I‟m surrounded by a sort of inventory of
my life, with intimations of my future. I like discovering, in almost
forgotten volumes, traces of the reader I once was…”(237).
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005

9. Hamilton 9
“But then I have also had to acknowledge a grave, irreparable loss.
I know that something dies when I give up my books, and that my
memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia. And
now, with the years, my memory can recall less and less, and
seems to me like a looted library: many of the rooms have been
closed, and in the ones still open for consultation there are huge
gaps on the shelves”(238).
“The more descript my memory becomes, the more I wish to
protect this repository of what I‟ve read, this collection of textures
and voices and scents. Possessing these books has become all-
important to me, because I‟ve become jealous of the past”(238).
“The act of reading establishes an intimate, physical relationship in
which all the sense have a part: the eyes drawing the words from
the page, the ears echoing the sounds being read, the nose inhaling
the familiar scent of paper, glue, ink, cardboard or leather, the
touch caressing the rough or soft page, the smooth or hard binding;
even the taste, at times, when the readers fingers are lifted to the
tongue…”(244).
“Annotations, stains, marks of one kind or another, a certain
moment and place, characterize that volume as surely as if it were
a priceless manuscript”(245).
“The Author As Reader”
“The Translator As Reader”
“…the reader‟s ability is to re-create the past”(265). “But whose
past?”
“As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a
barrier…we cannot escape the fact that is language is the limit of
our universe”(276).
“Forbidden Reading”
Slavery a sponsor of literacy that blocked access of reading and
writing to slaves because to be able to read would mean a threat to
the power structure.
Censors as those who shape literacy
A History of Reading notes
Buffy Hamilton, ©2005