Authorized Readers, or, Reading Authority

Abstract

The layout and production of the medieval illuminated manuscript reveals in part the way late medieval book producers constructed the act of reading. Reading was imagined as a process of interiorization, through which texts are translated into the mental threads that affect ethical action and learned response. In part this dual textual aspect was the result of the scholastic reading revolution that reached its apex in the thirteenth century. The rise of the university and the corresponding attention to reading and meditatio that accompanied it established reading as part of an official culture. This culture essentially institutionalized reading, establishing a set of rules and procedures that attempted to fix the associative processes that might overrun and make too pleasurable the act of private reading. Reading thus “became a practice that one could organize and determine in advance, having as its objective the cultural preparation and the didactic and scientific activities of the new professional intellectual.”1 Though the act of reading always “faces in two directions,” encompassing both a private response and a social or institutional context that controls the interplay of meanings available to it, in the scholastic tradition the institutional conditions dominate private response.2