Story reading

The history of reading has become a field of very fruitful studies from the 1970s, especially with the array of historiography developed in France that became known as new story. It was with this "new history", or new cultural history, which developed the interest in new objects of study, new approaches and new problems to history. One such new "objects" was exactly the "practice of reading", that is, as in every period of human history the practice of reading was becoming according to the social construction of each one of those times.

The focus of the "new history" aimed to abolish the old schemes of historical studies that held the schematic and generalizing analysis of the past that did not provide elements to capture the atmosphere of the various situations in which they found the various human groups. To carry out the attempt at such seizure, it was necessary to channel the research for the "story of practices."

The history of reading practices is closely linked to the history of writing accommodation brackets. These supports can be provided the tablets with cuneiform writing from ancient Mesopotamia to the virtual writing of computer monitors, through papyrus scrolls, codices, written in stone, written on leather, among others. These brackets determined or, at least, contributed decisively to shaping the practice of reading in each particular time. For example, in ancient societies where writing was a privilege of priests, scribes and others linked to hierarchical functions, the reading was, by definition, an oral and collective practice. I read aloud to a lot of people. Learning is, most often, of several literary texts color, it was the case with the education of children in Athens, decorating and recited excerpts from Homer's epics.

The practice of silent reading, that is, the individual reading habits and silent, just born with the copyist monks in the Middle Ages. And he was born in that particular context and with these stakeholders because of the circumstances in which they were entered. The monks who had a duty to copy, that is, the replica of manuscripts, were classics (Greek and Roman) or Christians, and the ornament of the codices (books in which the copy was inserted) illuminated (illustration art of codices) , needed a quiet environment favoring the close reading and accuracy for work. Since then, the practice of silent reading is laicizou-became common, especially after the invention of printing by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century.





Medieval codex illuminated

In the eighteenth century, with the advent of literary romanticism and book fairs in several European cities, the practice of reading has become a really popular habit and with great impact on society. Suffice it to say that reading political pamphlets and philosophical writings of Enlightenment mobilized, largely bourgeois France to revolutionary action of 1789.

One of the main representatives of the studies on the history of reading, the historian Roger Chartier, he devoted himself to realize the impact that reading practices exercised those he called "interpretive communities" throughout history. The relationship we have today with reading, for example, is closely linked to the construction-dependent social habits of technology, such as computer screen and the internet.