The Study

Starred review from November 15, 2024
A historical account of the origins of the personal library as portrayed in the paintings, plays, drawings, and novels of the Renaissance. In the 15th and 16th centuries, an emerging group of scholars retired to their studios to converse with the texts of antiquity (as did Petrarch), embrace sanctity through biblical scholarship (as did St. Jerome), or explore their inner lives (as did the essayist Montaigne). The studio was a "living, breathing crucible of thought" that served as a sanctuary for self-contemplation. "Renaissance humanists [had] created an intimate place of the soul." (Of course, these spaces were affordable only by those wealthy enough to have spacious homes, hire booksellers such as Vespasiano da Bicci, and purchase books.) Hui, humanities professor at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and author ofA Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, also notes that the bibliophilia that motivated these scholars could become bibliomania. Here he turns away from real people to fictional ones: Don Quixote in Cervantes' novel of the same name, Prospero in Shakespeare'sThe Tempest, and Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's famous play. Reading books in the solitude of their studios detached these men from reality. The pivot between the love of books and their power to derange, Hui claims, was Rabelais' exercise in "unruly excess." Throughout, Hui offers close, interpretive readings of the many representations of personal libraries and the scholars portrayed there. Notably, he does not confine himself to the architectural space of the studio but points to how books were central to and came to symbolize humanism and modernity. 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.

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October 7, 2024
This stimulating history from Hui (The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature), a humanities professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, examines the origins of the Renaissance “studiolo,” a “personal library of self-cultivation and self-fashioning.” Since the time of St. Augustine, libraries had primarily been “ecclesiastical site of spiritual devotion,” Hui explains, suggesting that Petrarch’s decision in the mid-1300s to create a personal library of classical writings secularized the private study and transformed its focus from divine communion to self-improvement. According to Hui, Michel de Montaigne viewed personal libraries as central to his concept of the “modern liberal self,” believing the privacy and solitude they afforded served as the ideal conditions from which the individual could emerge. Other Renaissance writers were more skeptical of the personal study. For instance, Hui argues that with Don Quixote, the story of a low-ranking noble whose obsession with chivalric romances causes him to believe he’s in one, Miguel de Cervantes expresses unease with how the seclusion of the studiolo could easily tip over into solipsism and delusion. Such anxieties, fueled by the 15th-century advent of the printing press, put contemporary hand-wringing over modern technology in perspective, and Hui makes a convincing case that personal libraries were intimately bound up with Renaissance conceptions of selfhood. Bibliophiles will find much to ponder.