The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

by Andrew Hui

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance library

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Books About Books, Cultural, Renaissance, Italy, Writing

336 pages, Hardcover

First published December 3, 2024

About the author

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this pretty dense and difficult to grasp in many places. I had to look up A LOT of words. Something I am not used to having to do.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting study of the library, both its promises and its perils. While a place where thousands of years and dead authors are magically brought into the present, it also "may promise a false abundance" (10). Hui's study (pun intended) also doubles as a book on how knowledge as an idea shifts from a consensus of luminaries past to the invention of a solipsistic and brilliant scientist all by his lonesome.

[Sam Bizarrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interestingly, The Study isn't strictly a work of intellectual history or literary criticism, but often evolves into something more personally reflective and complicated. It often feels narrative driven, rather than argument driven, and the movements within the book feel often, even as we delve into the woes of bibliomania, like the encomium to reading that anyone (especially those inclined to recording their reading on a website) can appreciate and relate to. But, honestly, this book is elevated by Hui's subjectivity, the brief glimpses of his own life that he shares, intermittently, throughout the book. How thoughtful, and artful, to bring together the personal essay with the critical; it seems of apiece with his fellow Princeton alum (who also writes, thinking with Auerbach) Daniel Mendelsohn. For both, literary history is the entrée into the writer's own past and history.

But when writing about the studiolo, and reading qua itself, how can the writer not be personal? The book is an intimate portrait, for Hui and for one of his subjects, Montaigne. Hui doesn't write about Erasmus here (brief mentions here and there, including some references to Lisa Jardine's fabulous biography), but the book, for him, was a kind of living thing, more intimate than even the physical flesh. Hui knows: what we read is who we are. It's also who we may become, and what we may be haunted by. The good, the bad, and the place of solace.
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I once wrote a little nothing about Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies, and it strikes me once again that the important part of that title is «livre» and not, as we may assume «cité».

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic, but... It is unnecessary to employ the entirety of the lexicon to articulate your thoughts effectively. In other words, Bro, why you use every word in the dictionary? The book was a little difficult to read at times, but I liked the author's take.

[heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Olga Vannucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

A little room of one's own,
To think and read and be alone,
And to collect the many things
That the world of wonders brings.

[Geof Sage · Rating 2 out of 5]

Self-indulgent and repetitive, I've read several other better books on both Faust and libraries.