In a Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy. net.

Today's episode, The Dark Night Rises, Spanish Mysticism.

There's a persistent notion that in antiquity people never or hardly ever read silently.

Instead, books were for reading aloud.

I like to imagine the ancient librarians at Alexandria constantly saying, shh, admits the cockophony and being cheerfully ignored by the hundreds of patrons as they recited the contents of their scrolls.

But sadly, this is a myth, in part based on a misreading of a passage in Augustine where he describes seeing his colleague Ambrose reading quietly and is apparently surprised at this.

In fact, he's just concerned over Ambrose's state of mind.

True, given the scarcity of books and frequency of illiteracy, reading aloud for the benefit of others was presumably far more common back then,

but there's plenty of evidence that the

ancients read quietly the way we do.

Platinus even mentions the all too familiar phenomenon of having your mind wander while your

eyes are scanning down a page

so that you don't register what you are reading.

Perhaps the reason people cherish the idea of silent reading has a more recent phenomenon

is that it fits so well with other ideas we have about

modernity. As we've seen a new kind of individualism is widely thought to have

emerged around the time of the reformation with Erasmus and the Protestants promoting a private internal spirituality at the cost of public and communal religious ritual.

Hamlet, that archetypal tragic hero of individualism is even sometimes depicted brooding as he reads a book.

So it fits with our preconceptions that another debate about silence emerged some decades before Shakespeare wrote his play in the context of 16th century Spain.

It concerned not reading, but prayer.

Early in the century, a reform movement among Franciscans encourage what they called recollection.

For historians of philosophy this sounds like an allusion to Plato and his theory that

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