The Study
The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries
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12 337 Ft (11 750 Ft + 5% VAT)
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12 337 Ft
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Estimated delivery time: In stock at the publisher, but not at Prospero's office. Delivery time approx. 3-5 weeks.
Not in stock at Prospero.
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Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Publisher Princeton University Press
- Date of Publication 28 January 2025
- Number of Volumes Print PDF
- ISBN 9780691243320
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages336 pages
- Size 234x155 mm
- Language English
- Illustrations 22 color + 65 b/w illus. 1061
Categories
Long description:
A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance library
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.
"[A] stimulating history. . . . Hui makes a convincing case that personal libraries were intimately bound up with Renaissance conceptions of selfhood. Bibliophiles will find much to ponder." More
