Through the Long Hours of Winter Darkness, Reading Aloud Was an Integral Part of Court Life

How Book Were Read in Chaucer’s Time

Through the long hours of winter darkness, reading aloud was an integral part of court life. It was also the accompaniment to many a meal…The Latin verb legere, which meant ‘to read’, could also be used as a synonym for dicere, ‘to say’: silent reading was the exception, rather than the norm, in Chaucer’s time…Even amongst ordinary folk, it seems to have been expected that there would be someone to read aloud to the others.

In the court, the choice of reader was obviously a crucial matter. It appears to have crossed boundaries of class and vocation…Sometimes the reader would be a beautiful damoiselle of the court or a handsome young man. A dull book presumably seemed less dull when read aloud by someone of youth and beauty.

But in the fourteenth century, as far as in-court entertainment went, the author-performer was king. It’s not hard to imagine the excitement that would be generated in a court where the author was about to read from his own work.

Then again, an author-reading might well herald the ‘premiere’ of a new work – something entirely original that no one had ever heard before. The anticipation would have been on a different level from that generated by a well-worn romance recited, for the umpteenth time, by a professional minstrel.

This anticipation may have been all the keener for the fact that the fourteenth-century author-performers almost invariably wrote in the vernacular. In other words, the court would be gathered to hear brand-new works in their own language.

And here perhaps it is worth pointing out that reading aloud was a matter of both habit and choice. It was not a halfway stage between the oral tradition of remembered poetry and the modern habit of silent reading. Reading aloud in a group was seen as the natural and preferred medium for the book. People chose to listen in a group for the same reason that nowadays people may prefer to watch a film in the cinema rather than watch a video at home. It is a totally different experience – particularly with a performance that requires some audience participation, such as comedy. The communal experience was seen as superior to the solitary one.

As one scholar puts it: ‘the normal thing to do with a written literary text…was to perform it…Reading was a kind of performance. Even the solitary reader most often read aloud…and most reading was not solitary.’

Real reading – for the majority of people – meant the celebration of a book by its being read aloud in public. In a way it was a simple question of good manners – at a time when books were scarce it would have seemed extraordinarily selfish to devour the contents of one all alone by yourself.