It is a commonplace of our contextualist age that reading is radically historical and that it is consequently a mistake to make inferences about how readers in the past processed texts on the basis of our lived experiences as readers today. 1 Eminent book historian Robert Darnton complains, for example, that many reader-response theorists “seem to assume that texts have always worked on the sensibilities of readers in the same way. But a seventeenthcentury London burgher inhabited a different mental universe from that of a twentieth-century American professor. Reading itself has changed over time.” 2 On this view, phenomenological descriptions of the reading experience are fundamentally flawed because they are ahistorical, universal, and essentialistic.

Contemporary neuroscientific research suggests, however, that there are fundamental continuities in how the brain reads that extend across the several thousand year span during which our species has interpreted written texts. According to Stanislas Dehaene, the preeminent neuroscientist of reading, the key fact is that “we take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna.” 3 As he observes,“Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading units”(5). The brain is historical, by this account, because it is a product of evolution, but the emergence of reading in Mesopotamia roughly 6,000 years ago is too recent and too rapid to have been caused by genetic transformations of the brain through Darwinian natural selection. 4 Neuroscientifically considered, this is the crucial mystery that the history of reading must explain. The basic anatomical features and fundamental processes of the brain have not changed significantly between our origins