Interactive Parchment: The Theory and Practice of Medieval English Aurality
Joyce Coleman
In the folder labelled 'Reading', in Warburg Institute's photographic collection, one finds romantic young men pondering over volumes of verse, and pretty women sitting by windows, devouring novels or dreaming love letters. Children perch window-seats, deep their story-books, old study Bibles, bearded sit at desks, frowning through pince-nez scholarly tomes. This is reading more less as we know it today: solitary, absorbing, silent. The attractions this kind are well known often discussed, particularly medievalists, for whom advent private marks an important boundary-point development literature. private, even silent, reader, allegedly possesses powers unavailable to those who listen a text recited read aloud. Eugene Vinaver claims that rise romance twelfth-century France marked birth world which vernacular writings were share with Latin texts privilege addressing reader medium visible, not audible symbols; [. . .] went radical alteration very nature literary experience.1
Yearbook of English studies