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This Is Your Brain on Books - Public Books

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T he subtle Saint Anselm, a Benedictine monk, treated reading as a form of communion. In his time, the 11th century, readers often consumed books differently than they do today. A common form of monastic reading, for example, was lectio divina, which monks treated—as Christopher de Hamel says in The Manuscripts Club, a group biography of manuscript lovers—as “an act of devotion, like prayer.” The reader would open a religious text to a random page, then prayerfully study the passage to see what message God had chosen for him now.1 This form of reading, de Hamel says, is one reason why so many medieval manuscripts have richly decorated pages. The decorations “helped impress a page visually in the reader’s memory,” helping him to meditate later upon the revelatory passage. We can see from this example how an era’s methods of reading affect the look and feel of its books. (And how they are valued. Anselm indicated in his correspondence that he preferred a faithfully copied but incomplete

T he subtle Saint Anselm, a Benedictine monk, treated reading as a form of communion. In his time, the 11th century, readers often consumed books differently than they do today. A common form of monastic reading, for example, was lectio divina, which monks treated—as Christopher de Hamel says in The Manuscripts Club, a group biography of manuscript lovers—as “an act of devotion, like prayer.” The reader would open a religious text to a random page, then prayerfully study the passage to see what message God had chosen for him now.1 This form of reading, de Hamel says, is one reason why so many

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