Lecture by Andrew Hui, Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore 

The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton University Press, 2025)

“This study studies the study. It investigates how Renaissance humanists created an intimate healing place of the soul—the studiolo—as a personal library of self-cultivation and self-fashioning. Cocooned within its four walls (or, if you’re Montaigne, a circular tower), the studiolo was an aperture through which you contemplate the world and a retreat wherein you cultivate the self. In order to know the world, one must begin with knowing the self, as ancient philosophy instructs. In order to know the self, one ought to study other selves too, preferably their ideas as recorded in texts. And since interior spaces shape the inward soul, the studiolo—the diminutive of studio in Italian—became a sanctuary and a microcosm. The study thus mediates the world, the word, and the self.”

The seminar is organized by the CEMES research group Thinking the European Republic of Letters. 

All are welcome!

Contact: Christian Benne, University of Copenhagen (christian.benne@hum.ku.dk)

www.cemes.ku.dk/research/thinking-the-european-republic-of-letters/