Monks, education and monastic reading (meditative reading?)

Browsing through 'The Golden Thread: The Story of Writing'. A few interesting paragraphs regarding education and reading. The book lays down a fascinating history of the written word and different stages of book and reading. 

 

Cassiodorus/ Vivarium (He was 60 when he founded Vivarium, c.540 CE)

Cassiodorous's monastery; vital to its intellectual life was a well-equipped library and scriptorium....He now set himself and his monks to work to provide the bare bones of a calssical education for those who would come after them, translating where necessary works from the Greek into Latin...He distilled the knowledge he felt important into the two volumes of his Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning. The list of recommended books and authors was often used by later monasteries as the basis of establishing and organising their libraries. These Instittutions provided practical advice and a rationale for a Christian and monastic education....His Institutions were fated to be one of the most copied and excerpted books of the Middle Ages. This work would have a greater effect on European culture than all the seemingly great events of his own 96 long years.

On monastic reading/ meditative reading

"Chapter eight in the Rule of St Benedict stipulates that every monk must be issued with a book to read during Lent, the period of forty days...to enable this Benedictine monasteries needed libraries. But monastic reading was different from the kind of reading we are used to. Today's followers of St Benedict, who have preserved his ancient practice of lectio divina, holy reading, liken it to the ruminations of a cow chewing the cud of the text. You take your time, reading short passages slowly and over again in the mind, spending time with each and allowing the words to speak to you. I know from my own few years of living as a Benedictine monk that a rich range of associations can arise from this moeditative engagement. This is very different from the forced-paced reading designed to extract information from the text, which many of us do today. Since a monastic book was designed to be read slowly and many times, libraries did not need to be extensive; wisdom was to be bathed in rather than simply acquired.

As to writing as a form of devotion - "the very act of copying books is now an end in itself."

Reading as rapture - 

Before the arrival of modern scholarship: The Didascalion ('On matters instructional') is a handbook on the art of reading, whose goal, is wisdom itself. In a world that believed in one God ruling all, wisdom was the perfect good, was God, and it could be journeyed into and dwelt within, in all its demanding and healing fullness. This was why a book could be lived with at ever-deeper levels of meaning, not just mined quickly for information.

What I find fascinating is his view of printing press, a little note below. 

"Printing changes the game?

At this point I find myself poised between two apparently contradictory statements. It is both hard to overestimate the impact of this one invention on the future shape of the written word, and at the same time I want to urge caution: it should not be overemphasized. From a long game point of view this is another moment in the unfolding story of writing and documents. It is confined to one culture, and even in that culutre there have been other moments -- we are living through one right now -- that have had an equally earth-shaking impact, the equivalent of a apradaigm shift. Furthermore, printing had its profoundest impact on the world of the book, but this is not the total sum of  the universe of writing/ There were and are many kinds of written artefact left untouched: personal writings like the diary, the letter, the list and handwritten note; business papers and accounts; legal documents, and even, some books which could not be put into print for another 200 years. Further, printing of various kinds had already been invented many centuries before. (Early clay tablets - impressed rather than written upon, Cretan Phaistos disc 1600 BCE, China tenth century onwards, Japan c.764 printed charms, woodblock prints in China, Tibet, Korea and Japan. Japan had a bibilography of 600,000 works printed so before it opened its ports in 1867, a number greatre than all the printed editions in any major European land of the time.)"

Then, the way the world changed, more books, more documents, required more writing by people other than scribes. At some point, after printing press but before typewriter was a sort of the age of handwriting. Different kinds of handwritten documents went up, and the postal services started growing (beginning late fifteenth century. In 1657 Cromwell established the General Post Office). A culture of observation and annotation led to many discoveries too. (LDV perhaps at the forefront here). Although the patent for something like typewriter was taken in 1714, Remington's typewriter was released in 1872 - in a way the earliest mechanical typewriting available commercially to many.

It is a fascinating look at history through the lens of writing.