In the past, this was the quintessential scholar, the philologist, the exegete. They all deciphered and interpreted ancient, obscure, or highly specialised texts. The Bible is certainly the text that has garnered the most commentators and commentaries to this day. There are also countless ancient books self-described as commentarii, a denomination that immediately placed them within a genre, with rules as specific as a grammar. This tradition has reached our times completely ‘secularised’, in the form of text commentary, an exercise that turns reading and the interpretation of literary texts into a classic, although endangered, goal of the school and university systems.