When books came home – Washington Examiner

This passage comes from a 1353 letter to a friend by the poet Francesco Petrarch explaining why he has remained in his small house near Avignon rather than make a planned trip to Italy and describing the pleasures of daily life in the countryside. His “friends” are his books; Rome and Athens are his private library. Petrarch told another friend that “I am unable to satisfy my thirst for books.” He amassed a sizable library and sought to donate it to the Basilica of San Marco in Venice toward the end of his life in exchange for a house. This proved unsuccessful, and his collection was split up and sold after his death.  

Petrarch was not alone in his obsession of collecting books. Bookmaking was a booming industry in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. What is new with Petrarch, Andrew Hui argues in The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, is his creation of a personal library in his home for the purpose of contemplation and “care of the self.” While most books were held by religious and civil institutions, Petrarch, Hui argues, is one of the first to create a personal library that was the site of “secular … self-care” rather than an “ecclesiastical site of spiritual devotion.” Petrarch, thus, “inaugurates a new tradition of the humanist studiolo.” 

The book is in two parts. In the first part, Hui traces the rise of the private library from Petrarch to Montaigne and explains how a “well-stocked library and well-furnished study became must-have for any self-respecting, high-net-worth individuals.” In The Book of the Art of Trade (1458), the merchant Benedetto Cotrugli writes that every good house should have both an office (a scrittoio) for welcoming visitors and a private study (a studiolo) for reading great works of literature. 

How a private study should be built and furnished became topics of much discussion. In On the Art of Building (1485), for example, Leon Battista Alberti remarks that private libraries should be built in the east or south side of the house to prevent “mold” or “rust” and be filled with “a large collection of rare books, drawn, preferably, from the learning of ancients.” They should be decorated with maps and various “mathematical instruments.” Paolo Cortesi, the bishop of Ubrino, argued in 1510 that a cardinal’s palazzo should have both a library and a private study. The study should be close to the bedroom, “safe from intrusion,” and have “a spiral staircase” to provide “an inside passage down into the library.” 

Federico da Montefeltro created one of the most elegant studies of the early Renaissance on the upper floor of his house in Gubbio next to his bedroom and his private chapel. (The study is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) Da Montefeltro amassed one of the largest private libraries of the Renaissance — the man who procured his books claimed it was larger than the Vatican’s — and employed as many as 40 scribes for copying. 

Hui notes how this obsession with books can be seen in the art of the time. Paintings of the aristocracy regularly show them reading in their private studies or holding books. While depictions of the Annunciation of the Incarnation of Christ to the Virgin Mary previously depicted her spinning wool, paintings in the 14th and 15th centuries began depicting her holding a book. 

The private study was both a place of privacy and community. For Petrarch, it is a place to be “alone with … companions.” For Machiavelli, it is a court away from court. “When evening comes,” he writes in a famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, describing his life in exile, “I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered in mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace.” For Montaigne, it is a private kingdom. In his Essays, he describes it as a throne room and a court where he withdraws from “conjugal, filial, and civil” society and instead pays court “privately to himself.” “Sorry is the man,” he writes, “who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself.” 

Hui repeats the claim that a private library was a locus of “self-care” dozens of times without unpacking what the Renaissance view of “self-care” might be — and how it might differ from contemporary notions. Yet, he notes how the private study, for Petrarch and others, was not an escape from the world but a way to prepare to face it. The contemplative and active life are connected, and the person who lived a well-ordered life moved back and forth between them. Many of the descriptions of private studies that Hui highlights (both in the West and the East) note the importance of having a view of the outside world — gardens and fields — reminding the scholar of this connection. 

The second part of the book is a disappointment. Hui riffs on various depictions of readers and libraries in literature from Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus. It is all surface, no depth, spruced up with cloying metaphors or disguised with jargon. All “knowledge is situated knowledge, as gender studies has taught us,” he writes in one instance. We “have to acknowledge,” he writes in another, “that literature from its origins also consists of entire ecosystems of content engineered to influence.”

Far too frequently, Hui provides the source language of translated text, sometimes running to three paragraphs, for no apparent reason and regularly provides the uncomplicated original for banal expressions like “The shape of my library is round” or “in the archives of La Mancha.” It seems Hui may have run out of things to say, hence the padding, which is too bad for a book on such a fascinating topic.

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Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.