The Soul in the Studiolo: On Renaissance Libraries, Solitude, and the Self
Why did Renaissance thinkers retreat into rooms of one’s own—and what did they hope to find there?
In this conversation, Giles Mandelbrote joins Andrew Hui, the author of The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton, 2025) to explore the studiolo as a space of solitude, scholarship, and danger, tracing its legacy from Petrarch to Montaigne to Shakespeare. In the spirit of Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor,” we’ll wander across shelves and centuries to uncover how bibliophilia shaped—and bibliomania mis-shaped—the soul.
The evening will conclude with a reception and book signing—all curious bookworms welcome.
Andrew Hui teaches in Singapore, and is author of three books: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (2025), A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019, translated into 5 languages), and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2017). He was Brian Crawford fellow at the Warburg in 2015. He is currently at work on The Emperor’s Maze: The Jesuits in China and the Making of A Global Age.
ATTENDANCE FREE WITH ADVANCE BOOKING
image: Vision of St Augustin, Vittore Carpaccio, 1502 (Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice)
This page was last updated on 14 May 2025
