The History of Reading in the Western World is an important, now classic work that contributed, immediately after its first publication in French and Italian, to the scholarly dialogue on reading issues.

This scientific work consists of an introduction and thirteen texts, each covering a specific time period and addressing particular issues related to reading, outlining the changes in reading habits and methods. At the same time, it highlights the political, economic, social, religious, and cultural context of reading.

Written by experts in reading studies, the texts provide a comprehensive approach in the form of a collective volume, which examines the changes brought about by various means of reading, focusing on the production and circulation of texts, with a parallel reference to libraries. Particularly for the latter, the evolution of libraries is presented and the role they were called to play in each case is outlined.

In this way, the collective volume covers the history of reading from antiquity to the present day. Guglielmo Cavallo is an Emeritus Professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is considered one of the most important European scholars in paleography and the history of reading. Roger Chartier is a French historian from the Annales school. His work concerns the history of books, publishing, and reading.

The history of reading practices aims to cross-reference different approaches and various ways of understanding how the meeting of texts and their readers occurs. What unites all these positions is a common idea: to examine the changes in reading methods with the same fresh perspective with which major developments (cultural, religious, political) that have shaken Western societies from antiquity to today are studied.