The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

Synopsis

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance libraryWith the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe&’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo—a &“little studio&”—and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo&’s influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.Beautifully illustrated, The Study is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780691243337

Related ISBNs:

9780691243344, 9780691243320

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

Date of Addition:

12/03/24

Copyrighted By:

Princeton University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.