News Release

Awards allow researcher to read between the ancient lines

Grant and Award Announcement

University of Cincinnati

As you read this, the spaces between the words and punctuation guide you in the process. Chances are you're reading it silently, too. That's not the way the ancient Greeks and Romans usually read. They preferred no spaces, except to mark the end of the sentence. A story in St. Augustine's Confessions seems to suggest that they were not accustomed to reading silently, either, judging from Augustine's shock at finding his teacher and bishop, Ambrose, reading while "his voice and his tongue were at rest."

University of Cincinnati Professor of Classics William Johnson wants to discover more about how the ancients read and the reasons why they read the way they did. A $40,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow him to spend the 2003-2004 academic year working on this project. He has also been offered a fellowship at Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C.

Ancient reading is not an entirely new subject for Johnson. A preliminary article he wrote about reading in classical antiquity won the Gildersleeve Prize in 2000 for best article of the year in the American Journal of Philology. Already, he has spent 15 years at libraries in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Oxford, London and Cambridge researching the issue, as well examining dozens of pieces of original papyrus from ancient scrolls filled with columns of ancient text. His resulting study, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus, examines 450 examples of ancient writing and is slated for publication by the University of Toronto Press in 2003. A second book is expected to follow after his NEH fellowship.

Much of his future work will be based at UC's own John Miller Burnam Classics Library. With more than 180,000 volumes, it houses one of the world's largest collections in classical studies. "People come from all over the world to use this library," he says.

Johnson believes his work is needed because he is dissatisfied with the debate that has taken place since 1898 about reading in antiquity. Scholars have focused on whether the Greeks and Romans viewed reading silently as an extraordinary event, but Johnson contends that this misses the point. Research in 1997 by A.K. Gavrilov uses cognitive psychology evidence to argue that Greeks and Romans must have been able to read silently. The act of reading aloud requires the reader to first read visually and silently.

Instead of focusing on the act, Johnson suggests that the scholars should be exploring reading in a broader context, as a social system or "reading culture."

"It's not that Augustine had never heard of anyone reading silently, it's that it was a socially aberrant thing to do during this time period in this context of a teacher's interaction with his students," Johnson says.

"Why did the ancients so often prefer reading aloud to silent reading? School books used word spacing, so why didn't they use it for literature over the course of hundreds of years? They did underline the first letter in a line just before the end of a sentence. Why didn't they use other symbols? Did they just think it was more attractive?" he asks. "The Romans had word division early on but got rid of it in order to imitate the Greeks. Why would they do that?" The answer, Johnson suggests, lies in understanding reading not just as a "technology" or "medium," but as a complex cultural system. A "reading culture," according to Johnson, embraces ideas like aesthetics and social standing, in addition to the bare function of getting information from a written text.

"I want to concentrate on how exactly the ancients went about reading and how the ancient reading culture differs from the reading-from-printed-book model familiar to us today," he says. The answers hold tremendous implications for literacy issues, he argues. Gaining greater understanding of ancient reading becomes all the more important, Johnson stresses, because of the so-called technological shift that many believe is taking place right now in reading and writing as a result of the Internet and other technology.

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