AtsomepointduringtheMiddleAgesscribeschangedthestandardpractice
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ofrunningwordstogether and began separating them with spaces–with unforeseeable consequences. That’s the thesis of a new book, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, by Paul Saenger, curator of rare books at the Newberry Library. “I was fascinated with the late medieval world and why it was so different from the early medieval world,” says Saenger, who has a PhD in Renaissance history from the University of Chicago. “I came to the conclusion it was, in part, because of the accessibility of books–which had nothing to do with printing. These changes in the page long predated printing. You begin to wonder, when did this happen? Yet nobody knew.”
Separating words with spaces made texts much easier to read, which allowed individuals to read silently and on their own. It also seems to have enabled authors to be less ambiguous, to express complexity better, to make subtler distinctions–and that permitted a blossoming of writing that went beyond the standard slavish copying of liturgy. Saenger says that scientific texts in Arabic began to be widely translated. Mathematical and musical notation advanced measurably. Calendars of holy days could be calculated faster. Reference books became feasible. By the 12th century there arose “the possibility of a new intimacy linking author, text, and reader.” And in the 13th, “an explosion in the quantity of logical writings.”
