The first man whose habit of silent reading is on record was St.
Ambrose (died in 397); Augustine, Confessiones 6.3. His accomplishment
came at the wrong time to be picked up by the schools; for the correct literary
Latin of books was by then so far from ordinary speech that children could not
readily have been taught to read and understand it without bothering to
pronounce it. Until the late nineteenth century, even in the most advanced Occidental
countries, the skill was limited to an occasional gifted individual, who taught
himself not to move his vocal organs in reading. (Saul Levin, “The ‘Qeri’ as
the Primary Text of the Hebrew Bible,” General Linguistics 35, no. 1
[January 1, 1995]: 184 n. 3)
Here is the text
from Confessions 6.3:
When he read his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would
explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. (The Confessions,
Part 1 [trans. Maria Boulding; 2d ed.; The Works of Saint Augustine: A New Translation for the 21st
Century; Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2012], 137)
In note 20 to the
above, Boulding noted that:
This famous passage has sometimes been taken to imply that Ambrose
invented silent reading. It was undoubtedly known earlier. See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations V,40,116 on the
advantage the deaf may derive from reading poetry. Augustine himself silently
peruses scripture at VIII,12,29. But reading aloud or in a muttered undertone
was the more common practice and long continued so. Saint Benedict’s Rule (48,5) reminds monks who read while
lying on their beds to do so without disturbing their neighbors. Until at least
the end of the Middle Ages the reading of scripture was understood as an
activity involving the whole person, physical as well as mental and spiritual;
gastronomic metaphors of mastication such as chewing the cud were commonly used
for it, as is the case a few lines above.
