When we think of monastic reading we imagine it performed in common: in the refectory during meals, or at collation in the evening, or in the daily chapter. Although private prayer was from earliest times part of the monastic day and private reading is mentioned in Benedict's Rule, opportunities for such reading expanded at the end of the Middle Ages. Such private practice represented a shift away from the more common, older form of reading – that is, by listening – to the newer form of reading by looking. In particular, moments for individual reading in the monastery may be linked with a development which episcopal visitors struggled to suppress: the growth of privacy within a communal setting.

The opportunity for such solitude presented itself through two gradual and much-opposed evolutions in the traditional monastic rule: the decay of shared dining and the division of the common dorter into separate cells. Each of these changes was strongly criticised by contemporaries, who feared their effect on monastic life. Their effect on communal reading, however, was perhaps as powerful as their influence on communal spirituality. These practices moved religious life away from the older form of reading and toward the new. The visitation injunctions, for instance, which commanded religious superiors to restore refectory dining abandoned in favour of small-group meals are so frequent as to make us wonder how widespread the presence of a lector in the refectory still was. It may be that this eating practice had unlooked-for effects. When meals were no longer taken with the community and when, as a result, refectory reading no longer reached the ears of an entire house, the corollary may have been not only an increase in private dining but also in solitary reading.

Similarly, when cloth or wainscot partitions effectively carved small cells out of a shared dorter, the incidence of private reading seems liable to increase. Describing male Benedictine houses Barbara Harvey says, ‘From the late thirteenth century onwards, the General Chapter of the English Black Monks found it necessary to condemn the introduction of any kind of partition into dormitories – a sure sign that the innovation was already becoming popular.’