About this Event
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, .
Grolier Club Members
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.
Public Support
We appreciate your interest in the Grolier Club’s programming on the art and history of the book. For more than 130 years we have offered our exhibitions and lectures to the public, free of charge. If you have enjoyed these offerings, and would like to support that tradition, and help ensure that it continues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Grolier Club.
Accessibility
An ADA-compliant lift from street level to the lobby is available to anyone with mobility issues. All desk staff should be ready and able to assist you in operating the lift, with or without advance notice.
A “T-Coil” assisted listening system is available to anyone attending a lecture in the Exhibition Hall. Visitors with hearing aids should turn their devices to the “T” setting in order to access the system; visitors without hearing aids may request a “loop receiver” with earphones.
Environment
The temperature and humidity in the exhibition hall are tightly controlled for the sake of the valuable items on display, and this may cause the room to feel chilly, particularly in warmer weather, to those coming in from outside. Members and visitors are advised to bring a light wrap when visiting an exhibition, or attending an event in the hall.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, United States
USD 0.00
