Richard Ovenden in conversation with Andrew Hui

About the event

Join Richard Ovenden, Bodley's Librarian and Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries, for a conversation with Andrew Hui to discuss his work and recently launched book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (published by Princeton University Press).

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.

Speaker

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 (Fordham).