Inspiring Older Readers

The Study: The inner life of Renaissance Libraries by Andrew Hui
For those of you coming to this review and perhaps wondering what Andrew Hui’s book is about, I can’t do better than quote the author himself when he opens his own introductory section thus:
“The Study studies the study. It investigates how Renaissance humanism created an intimate healing place of the soul – the studiolo – as a personal library of self-cultivation and self-fashioning.”
Hui uses the term ‘studiolo’ – or small studio – to speak of those rooms or spaces created by individuals to give them space and a degree of solitude to think about the big questions of the world and, crucially, to explore their inner state and personal development. Typically, what facilitated their studies and reflected their tastes were the books they surrounded themselves with: books that allowed them to travel into the realms of thought and imagination in ways that being part of the wider world would not allow or enable.
Complete absorption in this literary life and the desire to keep adding to the collection until a substantial library emerges is a manifestation of what we’d now call bibliophilia – a positive and laudable desire to surround yourself with the best books and the best ideas those books contain. But, as Hui points out, bibliophilia has its converse, dark side, bibliomania, when the obsession with acquiring and reading books detaches the reader/collector from any sort of engagement with the external world. Walking the line between the two states can be a perilous enterprise – something the author illustrates in a series of studies of literary figures like Don Quixote, Dr Faustus or Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
These warnings about the dangers of retreating into your ‘studiolo’ and succumbing to bibliomania occupy the second half of the book but in the fascinating first half Hui takes us on a journey to discover how Renaissance humanists, perhaps culminating in its fullest express with Montaigne, developed the idea of the space to oneself where it would be possible to think transcendently about the ‘conversations’ you could have with your books.
The idea of the personal library, a place of refuge, escape and creativity, emerges as a secular construct when it is freed from the religious connotations of the monk’s cell, a space conceived as a place to contemplate religious texts and the notion of the divine. What the Renaissance humanist was concerned with didn’t exclude questions of religion and the divine but, equally, was not it’s sole concern. As Hui says ultimately of Montaigne:
“Thus his lesson to us is that in every studiolo lies an autobiography of the soul.”
I found this to be a book that operated on two very different levels – I was able to read it both academically and emotionally. This is undoubtedly a first class piece of academic research and it is possible to read and admire it at that level. But, for someone like me who has been busily (but never used this language before) building and inhabiting my own studiolo for many years, this is an emotional read – rather like reading about distant family or ancestors.
This is a book any book collector will want to read because you’ll see yourself reflected in so much of what is said. Available from Princeton University Press, you will be able to get a copy from your local independent bookshop – who will, of course, be happy to order you a copy if they don’t have it on their shelves.
Terry Potter
January 2025