Nella vigna del testo: Per una etologia della lettura

by Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich, noto per le sue polemiche contro le istituzioni della modernità, propone un saggio di "etologia" storica sulla lettura e sulle condizioni tecniche che, molto prima di Gutenberg, hanno reso possibile la nascita del libro così come lo conosciamo oggi.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Education, Books About Books, Technology, Medieval

234 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1991

About the author

Ivan Illich was an Austrian philosopher, Roman Catholic priest and critic of the institutions of contemporary western culture and their effects of the provenance and practice of education, medicine, work, energy use, and economic development.

Reviews

[Dave Bonta · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with most Illich books, the footnotes are right there where you need them, are fascinating in their own right — and can be skipped if you're in a hurry. Though why one would be in a hurry to finish such an entertaining look at the history of reading in the pivotal 12th century, I'm not sure. (I thought about trying to read the book out loud, but wasn't sure I could manage the plainchant.)

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

My biggest problem with Niel Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" was his implicit and unargued assumption of the supremacy of written over oral culture. However, Ivan Illich helpfully complicates such oversimplistic notions like "written culture"; he argues convincingly that a shift took place around the 1100s where writing became less a matter of dictation (centering the communal aspect of several inter-related oral and written roles, like dictator, scribe, etc.) into more a matter of silent reading and writing, something basically unheard of previously.

This is shocking to us contemporary readers, partially because something this important was never taught to us in school, and partially because we realize we've fallen so solidly into the ever-dangerous trap of presentism. Perhaps the most important formal aspect of Illich's writing is that it remains accessible while also being academic; in other words, never does it reek of the overly editorialized popular book language of today. I'm sorry to say it, but contemporary editors and book publishers have destroyed books, all in a foolhearty effort to compete with social media and Ted Talks and other worthless things. As a result, they always emulate this noxious tone of voice which has far too much humor/faux-rebellion and pads everything with far too much summary/too short of chapters.

By contrast, Illich does a great job of giving us his own personality, all intermixed with glimpses into the text by Hugh as well as the medieval world that he was writing in. Though fads, fashions, and technologies change, the central thrust of Hugh's pedagogical message resonates forever: knowledge without wisdom is dangerous and disgusting. Today, we seek inhuman levels of "self improvement" at the cost of never zooming out to see the big picture. For Hugh and the other premoderns before him, there was no knowledge without morality. In his case, all knowledge was mentally categorized by chronology in the story of salvation. As a result, everything made much more sense, and learning, far from producing the anxiety we have today, was something that made sense of a larger whole.

Illich points out that "studying" in its etymological sense meant "affection, friendliness, devotion to another's welfare", rather than this cold utilitarian temporary memorization for a test, then jettisoning it into oblivion. In his day, they expected novices to remember what they read, essentially memorized, something which could be selected at will by recalling the "incipit", or first words of the text. The rest would pour out like dropping a scroll down the stairs. He started his novices off with that chronological rolodex I described above, but eventually they would learn to master a 3D schema for categorizing and locating knowledge, using Noah's Ark as the metaphor.

As I sometimes tell friends, there are certain books, like Scripture and Shakespeare, that I have to have a physical copy of when reading. I need to be able to underline, write in the margins, and otherwise Mark (ha) up the text. Thus, we with our codices (and increasingly our audiobooks, pdfs, ebooks) take for granted the portability and affordability of books. But for the medievals and earlier premoderns, texts were expensive, cumbersome things. Writing actually mattered, unlike us who shoot off drunken texts and tweets at all hours. For them, writing was a communal thing: normally it was dictated to a scribe, and some like Origen had even more complex systems of several rotating scribes writing shorthand on wax tablets who then gave their notes to calligraphers who wrote out the shorthand into longhand.

Whatever the particular level of complication, a basic collaborative aspect persisted: you rarely wrote something private. In one way, this would prevent a lot of the worthless drivel that gets written these days, but it also would cause some pressure in terms of what could and couldn't be said. It's a double-edged sword, but it forces one to think of how far this communal aspect pervaded their entire existence. Though some of us today act with God in the back of our minds, many people have successfully undone that conscience. For them, there was a continuity in terms of your actions being seen by God and your writings being seen by your compatriots at the monastery. "No Man is an Island" would have been redundant to tell them, since they hadn't yet forgotten it.

This general lack of a private individual lends credence to Harold Bloom's notion that Shakespeare created the individual, yet thankfully Illich doesn't fall into the same presentist trap that Postman and others often do. Niether does he waste time lamenting the long-gone past; instead, he lays out the developments with awe, mostly in service of a broader comprehension of literacy, communication, and knowledge transmission. It's important to root out our cliches when possible, and he does this in a way which doesn't make you feel bad for not knowing. If anything, he helps us appreciate the distance that small developments can make, like using alphabetic indexes and other "boring" things we take for granted. But we should lose our arrogance and remember that there's a billion things we don't appreciate which the next generations will discover and forget were ever new.

The biggest loss in my opinion has been the shift away from embodied reading. Illich makes a point of illustrating how for the Medievals, reading consisted of Ruminating on the text, reading it Aloud and reciting it to one's self when not in its presence. It was something physical, with the finger under the line of text, and it was something aural, with all the speaking, reciting, and dictating. I can't help but think that many if not most of our problems (personal and social) stem from forgetting about the body and denigrating it in the ways which modernity encourages. Similarly with us managing to forget that reading in our heads and writing silently are comparatively new, so also is this notion of dissolving into media and forgetting one's body. The old reactions to media digested it in various ways, like dancing when one heard music or reading aloud when one saw text. Our timidity is damnable, but it's far from permanent. All it takes is a critical mass of people not being embarrassed by our embodiment, and we could help heal some of the stupid self-inflicted wounds we're tricked into thinking are normal and normative.

In a modern world defined by people like Peter the Lombard who treat texts as resources to be quickly navigated and only partially digested, be a Hugh of St Victor, who "insists on patience and leisurely tasting of what can be found on the page." There's no rush. You have both the time and the duty to form a relationship with texts that really matter. AI can consume much more than any human ever can, so enjoy your slow consumption of the classics, the greats, the olds, because there's nothing worthwhile in the "news."

[jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, dense but enjoyable, absurdly well-cited history of monastic reading in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Illich, with Agamben, represents my kind of take on medieval studies: pure pleasure.

[Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taught me more about the alphabet than I've learned since the song.

[alli · Rating 3 out of 5]

cool but also so so dense

[Dawson Escott · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay is so clearly the record of a lifetime of knowledge regarding medieval and monastic culture. Its insights on the alphabet as a technology and how the way people read has changed over time are very interesting and persuasive and I have a whole lot to chew on. I really think Illich is a genius that you kind of have to contend with even when you disagree.

As is typical of the Illich I read, the argument is pea-soup dense and at times a little tricky to follow due to weird word choice or his tendency to bounce off a point very suddenly. And I can't recommend more for the casual reader like me-- ignore these footnotes. There's a whole lot of them, and I'm sure you could pursue lots of lines of research, but my reading experience was much better once I just directed my attention to the main text. I also felt that he spent too much time focused on the pre-"bookish" reading of monastic life, which I'm sure is interesting to some, but felt like well-worn territory for me personally after taking that annoying Catholic lit class.

I wish I had a critical edition or something that explored more how in the digital age our approach to reading has changed even more, Illich hints at this new shift but doesn't pretend to analyze it.

[Brahunja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Letto il: 20/01/2025
Lingua: Italiano

Commento:
Un testo breve ma molto interessante riguardo alle pratiche di lettura del XII secolo, periodo della prima rivoluzione della lettura. L'approfondimento sulla figura di Ugo di San Vittore mostra perfettamente le dinamiche dei cambiamenti in atto.
Grazie a questo libro ho anche avuto l'opportunità di riflettere sul modo in cui approccio i testi. Davvero una lettura illuminante.

[Ross Bonaime · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the Vineyard of the Text is my 11th book in my attempt to read my way through James Mustich's 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die book, and in it, I found a great quote from Hugh's Didascalicon that perfectly sums up my plan to read all these books:

" The wise student, therefore, gladly hears all, reads all, and looks down upon no writing, no person, no teaching. From all indifferently he seeks what he sees he lacks, and he considers not how much he knows, but of how much he is ignorant."

There are so many blindspots not only in what I read, but what I know about the world, and from the very first book, this quest of sorts has been rewarding. Would I have ever read a book with a title like In the Vineyard of the Text without this list? Almost certainly not.

Even in Mustich's description of In the Vineyard of the Text, he describes the Didascalicon as an obscure 12th century text. But what Ivan Illich is really doing with this commentary is tracking the history of reading, from a practice only for the religiously affiliated to a portable option that could be read by anyone. Illich presents ideas I had never even thought about when it comes to reading, such as that it took centuries for people to realize they could read silently, as opposed to reading out loud, or just how long it took people to discover the ease of alphabetical organization. The history of reading itself is far more intricate and menial in its evolution than I would've expected.

My major problem with In the Vineyard of the Text is more of a structural issue than any problem with the book. Almost every page of Illich's book is packed with massive footnotes. In many cases, the footnotes take up more of the page than Illich's actual writing. This bothered me throughout the book for two reasons. First, much of the detail in these footnotes could've easily been part of the actual text. Many of these footnotes are integral to the story Illich is telling, and I'm not sure why he doesn't allow the footnotes just to reference what books he's mentioning, rather than putting fascinating details into them that should've been part of his commentary. Secondly, going back and forth from text to footnote can be unwieldy, and they are so consistently present that it's easy to lose the rhythm that the book has going for it. Every time I went to a footnote, I felt like I was losing my place and had to get my bearings with the book once more.

I finished In the Vineyard of the Text in one day, and while that might be because it's a relatively short read, I also found Illich's history of reading quite compelling. I wish he had integrated the material from his footnotes in a cleaner way that didn't disrupt the story so consistently, but the story he does tell is surprising and unknown to me before now.

[Adam Marischuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pivotal point in the history of literacy

Ivan Illich is always insightful and controversial...but not necessarily in that order. I was assigned this book many years ago in a Medieval Studies course with Paul Edward Dutton and I never gave it the appreciation it deserved until much later.

Illich's thesis is that Hugh represents a watershed moment in western literary where we move from external processors of written material to internal digestors of it. This is closely linked to Hugh of St Victor's more spiritual Platonism, "What Hugh doesn when he 'reads' cannot be understood without recognizing the place at which he stands in the history of both arts. He recovers the antique art of the rhetor and teaches it as a reading skill to monastic mumblers." (p.42)

Hugh is writing, and Illich is trying to recapture, at a time when literacy was far from the universal key to education that it is today. The written word held a certain mystical and metaphysical aspect which became lost in the mass production of reading material and the commercialization of reading and education (what he calls variably Scholastic and bookish reading).

Illich brings his wide knowledge to task on the subject and one cannot help but think that his romantic notion (as opposed to utilitarian) of reading found resonance in the milieu of 1960s rural Mexico. The page is litered or decorated (depending on your like or dislike of the use of illustrative quotes) with quotations from nearly everyone and everywhere. Footnotes, always a pleasure, frequently occupy more than half of the page and the bibliography runs an astounding 30 pages.

Best to be drunk like wine, slowly.

[Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short collection of lectures is a delight, and not simply because Hugh of St Victor remains such an intriguing thinker. The initial lectures describe Hugh's theological vision of the book as a path for "pilgrims of the pen" which leads to Wisdom. Hugh believed all people are ultimately called to this path and laid down principles of readership, which he took to be participation in the divine remediation of the cosmos through the incarnation of the Word in the reader. However fascinating these early chapters are, Hugh's personal presence in the book wanes as Illich waxes in his primary thesis: that a revolution took place in the 12th century that changed the way we have read, written, and thought, up to the horizon of the digital age. Modes of thought and technology converge and revise one another; so Illich (writing in 1993) looks ahead with curiosity and some trepidation to the way the screen is working a similar revolution in our relationship with the text. This book, down to the copious footnotes, is well worth the read.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is reading anything more than the mere communication of information? Part exegesis on the writings of Hugh of St. Victor, part historical account of the transition from the monastic to scholastic era of education through the 12th and 13th century, and part manifesto on the spirituality of reading, 'In the Vineyard of the Text' is a unique work that provides an insightful understanding of the world in which the 'bookish text' came into existence, and what it may tell us about the nature of reading in our own post-bookish world of today.

Illich's guide through the early medieval world, Hugh of St. Victor, is a man at the pinnacle of an epoch in which all of creation is a book, and every man-made book is a garden of words and illustrations, covered in gold and gems, and is read aloud and almost always within a liturgical or monastic environment. For Hugh, reading is the personal search for divine Wisdom, and the reader's interior journey through this wisdom is the pilgrimage that takes him, with the aid of the virtues and the grace of God, to his own perfection. A student of St. Augustine, who famously said that God wrote two books - the Book of Nature and the Book of Redemption, Hugh knows that all of creation is impregnated with meaning, and therefore reading is the very life of the Christian monk, by it he encounters meaning and comes to discern the great mysteries and gifts of God. The idea that reading as an activity is something that can be done for the sole purpose of accumulating knowledge and information, outside of any spiritual or transcendent aim, is an affront to Hugh and something he starkly warns against. Reading is never an act of abstraction for Hugh, it is an act of Incarnation, leading one towards He who is both "the Word made flesh" and who reveals the Book of Life.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The duty to read -

There are many persons whose nature has left them so poor in ability that they can hardly grasp with their intellect even easy things and of these persons I believe there are two sorts. There are those who, while they are not unaware of their own dullness, nonetheless struggle after knowledge with all the effort they can put forth and who, by tirelessly keeping up their pursuit, deserve to obtain as a result of their will power what they by no means could possess as a result of their work. Others, however, because they know that they are in no way able to encompass the highest things neglect even the least and, as it were, carelessly at home in their sluggishness, they all the more lose the light of truth in the greatest matters by their refusal to learn those smallest of which they are capable."
- Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, from the preface, p.43.

At once medieval in its sources and modern in its message, this commentary is both one of the text and of reading culture in the modern era. With Hugh as muse and guide, Illich documents the lessons books have taught us before the pages of history are transformed to computer disks.

[Mystie Winckler · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a very interesting and helpful book that informed my understanding as I researched for my NSA grad class final paper. However, there were definitely times where I wondered if we'd read the same book. It didn't always seem connected to Didascalicon.

[Ronald Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite authors, highly recommended. According to Hugh of St. Victor memory training was the pre-condition to reading. One uses the memory arts not merely to order his mind to the truth of things but to order his soul towards Wisdom.

[Alf Bojórquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hermoso libro para lxs que nos dedicamos a la lectura y el estudio.

[Mariana Ludmila · Rating 5 out of 5]

El mejor libro que he leído.
Un imperdible para cualquier persona interesada en educación o literatura.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe that many would enjoy this, but it was written for me, at this time, and I was enthralled. I learned a lot from Hugh, and from Illich for bringing this forth. But why did he? Who is his audience??!! Anyway, it's a thematic book for me, a springboard for ideas and I had many about my own work as a whole. Especially the Mental Palace, and using Noah's Ark as the palace. I knew of mental palaces, but had not thought on them in regard to the drama. A clear linkage. And yet, it's just an essay, so cannot be "great". I don't care and give it 4 stars.
PS. Big thanks to J Mustich for the rec.

[Antonio Sordillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riscoprire la lettura come pratica spirituale prendendo a modello il Didascalicon de studio legendi di Ugo di San Vittore. Ivan Illich ci riesce emozionandosi ed emozionandoci, indagando un modo di leggere i testi che già stava scomparendo nel XII secolo, all’epoca di Ugo. Eppure, quella comunità di borbottanti che fu la scuola di San Vittore leggeva, esercitando la memoria e la voce, e faceva di ogni esperienza di lettura la presa in custodia di un tesoro unico e inestimabile. Un saggio scientifico che commuove, ma non saltate le note a piè di pagina: sono le ciliegine su questa meravigliosa torta multistrato.

[Mark Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing book...I read the Didascalicon first but now want to read it again. This book gives you an essential background to understand the context and true meaning of what Hugh wrote.

Intellectually challenging, but ultimately very rewarding.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look at how the written word changed in the 12th century. It went from a "circle of mumblers" (monks) to a textual world, which we are not fully inhabiting.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I continue to go back to this book to ponder the issues that Illich raises. Thanks to Illich, I have even read Hugh's Didascalion!

[Heather Bain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent piece. Illich has had a profound effect on my philosophy of life. He was a prophet.

[Aurangzeb Haneef · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful and careful book. I have re-read many parts. I would never like to finish it.