The Study

The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

Andrew Hui (Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature))

$49.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Pres
01 April 2025

History of architecture; Literature, Poetry & Criticism; Social & cultural history; History of ideas

With 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.

By: Andrew Hui (Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature))
Imprint: Princeton University Pres
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691243320
ISBN 10: 0691243328
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 01 April 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton) and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.

Reviews for The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

""[A] stimulating history. . . . Hui makes a convincing case that personal libraries were intimately bound up with Renaissance conceptions of selfhood. Bibliophiles will find much to ponder."" * Publishers Weekly * ""Impressively erudite, Hui has produced a substantial piece of scholarship. No avid and self-respecting bibliophile should be without this book set snugly on one of their study’s many shelves."" * Kirkus Reviews, starred review * ""This is undoubtedly a first class piece of academic research and it is. . .an emotional read – rather like reading about distant family or ancestors.""---Terry Potter, The Letterpress Project