later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. . .” (p. 1)

     In the absence of visual aids the reader will find himself 
doing exactly what ancient and medieval readers did, namely 
reading aloud. Readers continued to read aloud after the 
beginning of word separation in the later Middle Ages, and even 
after the coming of print in the Renaissance. But all these 
developments fostered speed and visual stress. Today, scholars 
using manuscripts read them silently for the most part, and 
the study of reading habits in the ancient and medieval world 
remains to be done. The comments of Kenyon (in his Books and  
Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome , p. 65) are helpful: “The 
lack of assistance to readers, or of aids to facilitate reference, 
in ancient books is very remarkable. The separation of words is 
practically unknown, except very rarely when an inverted 
comma or dot is used to mark a separation where some