Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?

Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?historyofinformation.com

78 points•ryanscio•3 days ago•62 comments•

62 comments

It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].

“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205520

claiir3 days ago

Seems hard to square your claim that “today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy” with the PISA [1] research.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

AdamN3 days ago

What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.

I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.

myrmidon3 days ago

Nitpick: This is old data; US performance in reading dropped to basically the lowest levels ever during the latest test:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...

US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.

walrus013 days ago

I would be very curious to see stats on what percent of American adults will answer a poll claiming in the affirmative to have read any type of novel cover to cover in the past year.

mgoetzke3 days ago

The methods of the PISA study are quite controversial. It doesnt even properly control for immigration and background and the fact how its presented to pupils.

In Germany in the schools I know of, its stressed a lot how it does NOT affect anything at all, so its not actually a test on ability, but also on ability to motivate oneself to perform well in a meaningless test.

Barrin923 days ago

There's different levels to literacy, there was quite sobering research published recently about English college students who couldn't parse the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, even with assistance[1].

It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information

[1]https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors...

RealityVoid3 days ago

Not sure. Since LLM's have their spot, I, personally, have been reading much more. And I was no slouch when it came to consuming written materials.

Sure, some of it is slop, some of it is pretty good. But I did read more.

phoronixrly3 days ago

I'm sorry, are you reading more because LLMs are doing your job in the meantime or are you reading more because you're mostly reading LLM output day to day now?

dr_dshiv3 days ago

Augustine describes silent reading himself:

“I returned in haste to the place where Alipius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Apostle there when I stood up. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter upon which my eyes first fell”

https://sourcelibrary.org/book/meditationes-divi-augustini-e...

dr_dshiv3 days ago

Using the SourceLibrary MCP in Claude, I also found an example going all the way back to Euripides. In this scene, Theseus reads a tablet and the chorus has to ask what it says (because he read it, but not out loud).

https://sourcelibrary.org/book/euripides-i-ion-hippolytus-me...

MiroslavPokorny3 days ago

Reading was very different in the old times, todays text is clear and filled with many aides that didnt exist back then.

For starters text didnt include spaces which im going to guess would have meant people tried to "sound" out sequences of letters and slowly found words and consumed the text. From what ive seen many times it was difficult to tell letters apart due to ink runs or simply because the ink was too think. Just imagine if its hard for us to tell capital eye and little el, it must have been impossible manytimes back then.

card_zero3 days ago

That's "aids", not "aides". Politicians have aides.

carlosjobim3 days ago

There were aslo no rules for spelling in the past, so you would have to sound out words much more (out loud or in your mind) to connect them to their meaning.

Toutouxc3 days ago

I see the comment is getting downvoted and I’d like to know why. AFAIK many languages had really very vague spelling rules and often several being used at once.

delis-thumbs-7e3 days ago

I have no idea, but with ADHD and all, I have taken recently the habit of reading aloud, especially course texts, doc’s and other boring stuff I easily get distracted with. I pretend to be a BBC 4 broadcaster. It seems to work. After awhile you can stop and just read silently.

jan_m_savage3 days ago

fellow ADHD. if you read in a place with no distractions, you can read silently, and fast for a long time.

ErroneousBosh3 days ago

My six-year-old is probably a bit ADHD, and with parents like his it's not surprising, but he will sit and read for *hours*, and stuff that's way beyond what you'd expect of a six-year-old. It's about the only time he's really quiet, and I mean the good kind of quiet, not the "sudden transient to quiet" that means you must drop everything and RUN to find out what they're doing *now*.

And then come the questions. So many questions.

I never want that to stop.

delis-thumbs-7e3 days ago

Yep, if I am interested or even obsessed by the text. I have read literature classics voraciously and have read books in one go in the past. I probably read some 50 books for my Masters. But unfortunately some documentation of a template language I need for a project, but am otherwise less interested in, fails to adequately fascinate me. Reading aloud helps me to concentrate on the boring text and actually read it, not skim without really understanding.

Point is, it is just one reading tool in the bag and it is foolish to think it has something to do with reading level or comprehension. Might be helpful for many people whose focus has been nuked by platform apps.

xhevahir3 days ago

There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.

RugnirViking3 days ago

Reckon you could give us some idea of the other side? What are the alternative explanations proposed? The passage here (albeit translated) seems pretty unequivocal.

It also doesn't seem that unlikely. I know a fair few adults who mutter to themselves under their breath while reading, never having managed to kick the habit of reading aloud.

Khoth3 days ago

For the other side there's A. K. Gavrilov's "Techniques of reading in classical antiquity", not (legally) freely available but quoted in various places such as https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/02/reading-silently-...

The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests. (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading silently by himself in a way that suggests it's entirely normal)

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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