With the advent of print in the 15th century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. They were known as Renaissance studiolos (or "little studios”). Andrew Hui, associate professor of literature at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, tells the story of these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation and reveals how they became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.
Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own little studios and looks at libraries in the works of Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to too much solitary reading: It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our age of information surplus and charts the studiolo’s influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.
Hui’s new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton University Press), is available for purchase.
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