In-Person Lecture: Andrew Hui on Renaissance Libraries

Join the Grolier Club as Andrew Hui, associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, will lecture on his new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton), which reveals how the Renaissance studiolo (“little studio”), a space dedicated to self-cultivation, became both balm and poison for the soul.

Prof. Hui, an insatiable bookworm himself, has combed literary and visual works to trace 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 saints as 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.

Hui will be introduced by Leonard Barkan, Class of 1943 University Professor Emeritus at Princeton.

The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries will be available for sale and signing at this event.

Hui’s previous books include A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, 2019) and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (Fordham, 2016).

Note: This is an in-person event. If you wish to register instead for the live webcast, .

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