In the Middle Ages, just the opposite was true. Reading was generally done aloud, often to an audience. It was an active process, so active that Susan Noakes, in her analysis of medieval reading, points out “that it had been recommended by physicians, since classical times, as a mild form of exercise, like walking.”
Reading in the Middle Ages considered a mild form of exercise.
In a Literary Lab project on 18th-century novels, English students study a database of nearly 2,000 early books to tease out when “romances,” “tales” and “histories” first emerged as novels, and what the different terms signified.
This may be a reference to the Eighteenth Century Collection Online-Text Creation Partnership (ECCO-TCP) project, which transcribed and marked up in XML ~2,200 eighteenth-century books from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database (ECCO). The ECCO-TCP corpus is in the public domain and available for anyone to use: http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-ecco/
For men of quick intellect and glowing temperament find it easier to become eloquent by reading and listening to eloquent speakers than by following rules for eloquence.
Similar to what Quintilian said.
I know it is an ordinary subject of inquiry whether more is contributed by writing, reading, or speaking. This question we should have to examine with careful attention, if we could confine ourselves to any one of those exercises. 2. But they are all so connected, so inseparably linked with one another that if any one of them is neglected, we labor in vain in the other two, for our speech will never become forcible and energetic unless it acquires strength from great practice in writing.
Writing is essential to improve not only the way we speak, but how we organize our thoughts. It produces clarity
READING remains to be considered.
First time this has been addressed explicitly for education, though Cicero did mention the need to be well-read