Thinking Aloud About Reading Quietly
Kindle Schmindle. The big breakthrough in reading was authored in the fourth century by St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, a thousand years before Gutenberg and 1600+ years before the iPad.
Until then, reading meant reading aloud. It was a culture of action, oratory, and the spoken word. Most books were hand-copied in monasteries, where the reading rooms must have been bedlams of mumbled babble, here and there disrupted — as is any Starbucks in the day of the cellphone — by the stentorian posturing of at least one delusional loudmouth.
To the amazement of St. Augustine and colleagues, as he reports in his Confessions, Ambrose would stare silently at a book, turn its pages, and somehow understand what it said. He revolutionized reading and laid the groundwork for 60 generations of librarians to hiss, “SHH!”
Augustine (who was from Algeria) also attributes to Ambrose the famous advice, if not the exact words, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”