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Erica Weaver is an associate professor of English whose research and teaching focus on the earliest English literature. She is the author of “The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England” (Oxford University Press, 2025), and co-editor of “Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy” (Manchester University Press, 2020) and “The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives” (ACMRS Press, 2018).

It is now a common assertion that we live in an age of distraction. Increasingly, this is seen as a problem for reading — especially when it comes to serious matter. But long before the advent of smartphones and social media, these were also pressing concerns in the Middle Ages.

Sometime between 397 and 401, the Church Father Augustine of Hippo lamented in his “Confessions,” “Behold, my life is distraction.” As he was well aware, distraction opened the door to all other temptations. What later poets and preachers would deem the “seven deadly sins” were actually first understood as eight kinds of distracting thoughts that thinkers had the power either to linger over or to rebuff.

Far from an innocuous sensation, then, distraction posed one of the most significant spiritual dangers of the period. It even invalidated central devotional acts like reading, praying and reciting the Psalms. After all, as the eighth-century monk the Venerable Bede quipped, how could distracted supplicants expect God to heed their prayers when they did not pay attention to them themselves?

Then, as now, focused reading and prayer proved difficult to maintain. On one hand, John Cassian, known as the father of Western Monasticism, prescribed “frequent reading,” “continual meditation on the Scriptures” and “frequent singing of the Psalms” — all decidedly textual activities — as bulwarks against distraction, each primed to cultivate a state of heightened attention. On the other, these were precisely the undertakings that proved most prone to distraction. As the great fourth-century theologian of the Egyptian desert, Evagrius of Pontus explained of a distracted reader:

“When he reads, the one afflicted with acedia” — a condition of listlessness resembling our modern distraction — “yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to reading for awhile; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep.”

Even in isolation in the desert, it could be hard to stay focused on his book. Reading may offer an antidote to wandering minds, but it could also prove hard to maintain. So, reading itself was prioritized as an activity that required particular attention and that posed particular risks.

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Pictured above: A depiction of the Last Judgement produced around 1031 in Winchester, taking place as a battle of books, with an angel and a demon both wielding their own. Courtesy of the British Library, Stowe MS 944, fol. 7r.