Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?
historyofinformation.com75 points by ryanscio 21 hours ago
75 points by ryanscio 21 hours ago
It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].
“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...
Seems hard to square your claim that “today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy” with the PISA [1] research.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
That is not what PISA is about. The test does not care about your ability to sit through "The Miserables". Long PISA exam text is still pretty short. The test is about your ability to figure out implied factual information from something somewhat convoluted.
This feels like a non sequitur? The point is that people either aren't able or willing to read books anymore; that's what the author of that Atlantic piece means by post-literate. By your own admission, PISA isn't relevant.
Nitpick: This is old data; US performance in reading dropped to basically the lowest levels ever during the latest test:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.
I would be very curious to see stats on what percent of American adults will answer a poll claiming in the affirmative to have read any type of novel cover to cover in the past year.
The methods of the PISA study are quite controversial. It doesnt even properly control for immigration and background and the fact how its presented to pupils.
In Germany in the schools I know of, its stressed a lot how it does NOT affect anything at all, so its not actually a test on ability, but also on ability to motivate oneself to perform well in a meaningless test.
There's different levels to literacy, there was quite sobering research published recently about English college students who couldn't parse the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, even with assistance[1].
It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information
[1]https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors...
What is the problem with that paragraph, other than the long sentence with many comma separated phrases?
The only 'non modern' bits are 'Michaelmas' (which I know is a Christianity related date), and 'undistinguishable' where I'd use 'indistinguishable'. So the note about the student being quizzed to translate to 'modern English' seems moot as it is modern English.
However, I'm English, so a number of the terms are immediately obvious.
I obvious know who the Lord Chancellor is (as the role still exists); as do the Inns of Court, being where Barristers receive their initial training. So I would suggest it is more a case of needing specific cultural knowledge, than needing enhanced language skills.
Bleak House: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1023/1023-h/1023-h.htm
As to the rest of the initial 7 paragraphs.
In P2, I had to look up "aits" (islands); otherwise they are all of no issue other than the length of the sentences, occasionally requiring me to reread a few phrases.
Basically Dickens is modern English, with a few archaic words being used.
Bleak House’s opening paragraph
> … As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
A completely functional high earning English-speaking software developer might easily find the above sentence hard to parse.
I find old school sitcoms hard to enjoy, probably because I am missing a lot of subtle cultural context. It doesn’t imply my comprehension skills are poor.
If you're accustomed to reading, for instance, a modern English language novel such as Stephen King's "1963", it's going to be difficult and awkward to sit down and read the first few chapters of Moby Dick.
But that's kind of the point. Even a person who knows zero old timey nautical terminology or anything about New Bedford and its history will have to pick up what's going on by inferring it from the context.
If that sentence is hard to parse, it probably means you have room for improvement in your reading skills.
Reading skills aren't 1:1 connected to comprehension skills, and of course not to intelligence. And most people will never need the higher levels of reading skills, since they mostly are useful for reading text which isn't well written.
A person trying to parse this sentence as a non-native English speaker (and possibly not from a Christian cultural/religious background) might encounter two things. Here's what I infer from it:
> > … As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
1. 'as if the waters had but newly retired' - this is clearly an allusion to the Christian biblical story of the Flood, Noah's ark, etc. The book was written in an era and for a target audience where the educated readers were almost all certainly regular dedicated Sunday church-goers.
2. It helps to understand the relatively recent 'discovery' of dinosaur fossils at the time the book was written, the beginnings of scientific understanding of them, and the history of Paleontology from approx. 1800 to 1900 to understand the reference to the Megalosaurus. It's my understanding that the book was written at a specific moment in history when the discovery of dinosaur fossils was a hot new scientific fad and would be reported on in the popular press.
Now if you're a person who is highly literate in English but you haven't specifically studied the history of how weird English people started going off to the far corners of the earth and digging up dinosaur bones and scientifically categorizing them (see section for 19th century here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paleontology ), and you don't get the part about 'the waters' meaning a reference to an entire planet wide flood in a religious myth, the whole sentence is not going to mean the same thing.
It's not that a highly literate English reader from, let's say, Bangladesh won't understand the words in the sentence, but a great deal of the underlying meaning will be lost. Much as you or I might not understand the metaphors, allusions and allegories in poetry or literature written 150 years ago in a foreign language.
My high school English teachers would not agree with me, but there is a line where “need” becomes “hobby” (short of a career in English Lit).
I have enjoyed reading Canterbury Tales but have little to no ability to parse Beowulf.
I don’t know where that line is, but pre-Shakespeare is at the least diminishing returns.
Reading the paragraph given to the students was very interesting. For context I'm much older, English is my second language, and it is very mediocre (but still much better than my generation average because of my work).
There were some words I didn't know either because of the cultural context (Michaelmas, lord chancellor, Lincoln's Inn Hall) or because of my limited English (the word mire for example). But in all cases I could infer enough meaning that I was able to read the paragraph without losing too much (except for Lincoln's Inn where I thought it was a literal inn but it's not very important for the understanding in the paragraph).
I would say I'm surprised that it was so hard for college students majoring in English but I also noticed that the young generation in my country has a big problem understanding figurative speech, worse than just a general lack of knowledge (it didn't help that it has been politically useful to pretend not to understand figure of speech for the last 15-20 years).
The students in question just entered college, they were right after the high school.
That being said, I found the study to be one of those trying to find the conclusion they want. The students were asked to explain details of the book as they read it for the first time and translate as they go. I can totally see myself failing this test and I used to read a lot. The way they conducted the study is just not the way I read.
It came across as the students were blamed for thinking out loud after they were asked to explain details as they go. I would be unfamiliar with terms like "whiskers" too. I would not know "Michaelmas term" meaning either.
And frankly, the whole paragraph is an atmospheric paragraph that carry no literal importance. You are supposed to take the feelings out of it, the exact composition of the mud layers is not the plot point nor of the books philosophy.
Assuming you're a native English speaker, why is "whiskers" unfamiliar?
If not referring to the beard as a whole, how else would you reference the facial hair - whiskers is less of a mouthful than any other term.
Literally every time this is posted you see a few or more people jump out and say "no actually Bleak House is impossible to understand and it's written terribly and it's a dumb study!" Which I think means that while literacy levels are declining, people's perception of their own level is not. We have forgotten what high literacy is meant to look like. The original HN thread was depressing.
Not sure. Since LLM's have their spot, I, personally, have been reading much more. And I was no slouch when it came to consuming written materials.
Sure, some of it is slop, some of it is pretty good. But I did read more.
I'm sorry, are you reading more because LLMs are doing your job in the meantime or are you reading more because you're mostly reading LLM output day to day now?
Augustine describes silent reading himself:
“I returned in haste to the place where Alipius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Apostle there when I stood up. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter upon which my eyes first fell”
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/meditationes-divi-augustini-e...
Using the SourceLibrary MCP in Claude, I also found an example going all the way back to Euripides. In this scene, Theseus reads a tablet and the chorus has to ask what it says (because he read it, but not out loud).
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/euripides-i-ion-hippolytus-me...
Reading was very different in the old times, todays text is clear and filled with many aides that didnt exist back then.
For starters text didnt include spaces which im going to guess would have meant people tried to "sound" out sequences of letters and slowly found words and consumed the text. From what ive seen many times it was difficult to tell letters apart due to ink runs or simply because the ink was too think. Just imagine if its hard for us to tell capital eye and little el, it must have been impossible manytimes back then.
There were aslo no rules for spelling in the past, so you would have to sound out words much more (out loud or in your mind) to connect them to their meaning.
I see the comment is getting downvoted and I’d like to know why. AFAIK many languages had really very vague spelling rules and often several being used at once.
Also there were lot more regional differences. So in lot of cases entirely different words were used for same thing. Actually unified vocabulary is pretty late thing all things considered.
Exactly. You don't have to go back many hundred years before the only spelling rules are "this letter represents this sound". Then feel free to piece together those sounds so they become words.
I have no idea, but with ADHD and all, I have taken recently the habit of reading aloud, especially course texts, doc’s and other boring stuff I easily get distracted with. I pretend to be a BBC 4 broadcaster. It seems to work. After awhile you can stop and just read silently.
fellow ADHD. if you read in a place with no distractions, you can read silently, and fast for a long time.
Yep, if I am interested or even obsessed by the text. I have read literature classics voraciously and have read books in one go in the past. I probably read some 50 books for my Masters. But unfortunately some documentation of a template language I need for a project, but am otherwise less interested in, fails to adequately fascinate me. Reading aloud helps me to concentrate on the boring text and actually read it, not skim without really understanding.
Point is, it is just one reading tool in the bag and it is foolish to think it has something to do with reading level or comprehension. Might be helpful for many people whose focus has been nuked by platform apps.
exactly.
i have read about 400 pages in one hyperfocus sessions, on a screen no less.
yet, i still prefer reading on paper.
best if the font is nice and large.
My six-year-old is probably a bit ADHD, and with parents like his it's not surprising, but he will sit and read for *hours*, and stuff that's way beyond what you'd expect of a six-year-old. It's about the only time he's really quiet, and I mean the good kind of quiet, not the "sudden transient to quiet" that means you must drop everything and RUN to find out what they're doing *now*.
And then come the questions. So many questions.
I never want that to stop.
Good for you!
Getting enough sunshine also alleviates serious ADHD effects, so only the mild, good ones remain.
There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.
Reckon you could give us some idea of the other side? What are the alternative explanations proposed? The passage here (albeit translated) seems pretty unequivocal.
It also doesn't seem that unlikely. I know a fair few adults who mutter to themselves under their breath while reading, never having managed to kick the habit of reading aloud.
For the other side there's A. K. Gavrilov's "Techniques of reading in classical antiquity", not (legally) freely available but quoted in various places such as https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/02/reading-silently-...
The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests. (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading silently by himself in a way that suggests it's entirely normal)
Makes sense, with oral traditions being so strong back then. Debugging a codebase by vocalizing variables sounds wild.
Imagine how creepy a reader must seem to a ancient uneducated analphabet.
Guy looks down at artifact, eyes flicker, pages flipped- then looks up: "Now i know.."
the Augustine passage is a fascinating piece of evidence, but i wonder how much we can infer from it about the wider reading habits of the ancient world.
To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...
And you can't read long texts if there aren't that many to begin with. But it raises a question - why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
> why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
Moveable type was invented in the 11th century [1]. Kublai Khan moved in in the 13th. Then the Mings spent a couple centuries being autocratic menaces, Qianlong went on a pogrom of China's scholars and Europe caught up.
By the 13th century, China–uniquely–had both moveable-type presses and joint-stock companies. A combination of bad luck (the Mongols) and a tendency towards political shitshows squandered that lead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...
Yeah, we tend to forget that progress unfortunately doesn't move steadily in one direction...
Because the Chinese writing system is immensely complicated, and alphabets are far easier to typeset.
You have to know over two thousand characters to read classical Chinese, with some appearing very rarely.
Yeah, in Ancient Rome, the typical unit of writing was a scroll, not a book. Books (codices) only came to be widespread by 300 AD, and "widespread" still means "quite rare and expensive, but not totally unheard of".
I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "
If most of the audience is actually illiterate, why not draw a beer and a chicken leg instead? I believe that’s what most signage actually was.
Public signage with words was basically nonexistent in the pre-modern era. Why bother? The overhead of getting literate people was reserved for the stuff that couldn't be communicated in symbols, like keeping records for the taxman or contracts to prevent future land disputes.
British pubs traditionally have a hanging signboard with a pictorial illustration of the name. Several examples at:
My dad told me this (“people used to always read aloud”) as a kid and I didn’t believe him, I thought he was making some kind of joke. It feels like the same kind of discovery as “some people don’t see pictures in their head”.
“Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard.”
Samuel 1:13
The Hebrew says literally “speaking on her heart”
That example is prayer not reading, but yes there’s many Hebrew examples of meditating in the heart because most texts were memorised aurally rather than read directly.
A first century explicit example of private reading aloud is Acts 8:28–30 Philip runs up and "heard him reading" (ἤκουσεν αὐτοῦ ἀναγινώσκοντος).
Ten minutes of Claude searching the Hebrew and Greek scriptural texts came up with no examples that are explicitly private silent reading of text.
In this case it was a bespoke extemporaneous prayer, not something memorized but your point still stands. This is not an example of reading but it is used for the basis of the institution of the silent Amidah prayer according to the Talmud, even then of course it would have been memorized but today it is read from a prayer book.
"silent spell casting"
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