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Space Between Words

Name: Space Between Words
Brand: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9780804726535
Price: 192.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9780804726535

The Origins of Silent Reading

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By Paul Saenger
Imprint: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: March 1, 1998
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions: 229 x 153 mm
Weight:
Pages: 504

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Reading, like any human activity, has a history. Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually, in a muffled voice. The text format in which thought has been presented to readers has undergone many changes in order to reach the form that the modern Western reader now views as immutable and nearly universal. This book explains how a change in writing the introduction of word separation led to the development of silent reading during the period from late antiquity to the 15th century. Over the course of the nine centuries following Rome's fall, the task of separating the words in continuous written text, which for half a millennium had been a function of the individual reader s mind and voice, became instead a labor of professional readers and scribes. The separation of words (and thus silent reading) originated in manuscripts copied by Irish scribes in the seventh and eighth centuries but spread to the European continent only in the late tenth century when scholars first attempted to master a newly recovered corpus of technical, philosophical, and scientific classical texts.

Paul Saenger is George A. Poole III Curator of Rare Books at the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Appendix:

"Saenger outlined his revolutionary thesis 15 years ago in his famous essay 'Silent Reading'; the present magisterial book retells the story step by step... Paleographic studies rarely command wide audiences, but Saenger tells so important a story that Space Between Words will interest all who are concerned with the history of reading or the book." - Choice "Saenger's remarkable new book ... demonstrates that ... the scribal innovations of medieval Europe were no less seminal and far-reaching thatn those of post-Gutenberg typesetters... for the first time, we see the evolution of writing, print, and computing not as a succession of fitful revolutions but, rather, as a continuum of technological innovation." - College and Research Libraries "The work is, or should be, reading matter for every medievalist, not only for its impeccable scholarship and the information it contains, but also for Saenger's readiness to include neurophysiological evidence in support of his argument" - Written Language and Literacy "Very solid and convincing... a first rate analysis of how word separation emerged in the seventh and eigth centuries and eventually spread all over Europe." - Mediaevistik "This is an impressive, fascinating, and exasperating work of scholarship..." Language in Society

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