The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

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[s] 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. (Dec.)