The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

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.

About the Author :
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.

Review :
"[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." "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." "[A] delightful, wide-ranging work."---Michael O’Donnell, Wall Street Journal "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 "Hui’s prose is elegant and deliberately styled, melding personal discourse with a considered aesthetic."---Ed Bedford, The Indiependent "[A] fascinating investigation into personal spaces and libraries of the Renaissance. . . . All book and library-loving readers will find passages of interest." "Brilliant. . . . A delightful read that invokes feelings of escapism and intrigue, The Study is a book about bibliophiles for bibliophiles." "An exquisite venture into the world of books — not merely as objects of knowledge, but as intimate companions in the intellectual lives of their owners. . . Deeply thoughtful and evocative."---Cassandra Fong, Redbrick "Hui’s book is all the richer for its insistence on taking the reader, like a modern Mephistopheles, across the world."---Anthony Grafton, London Review of Books "Wide-ranging and erudite. . . . From the opening sentence, the work is humorously alive to the self-reflexive nature of reading and writing a book about reading and writing."---Ellen Werner, Modern Language Review