The Study – The Inner Life of the Renaissance Libraries

I recently spent a month at our family home in Scotland, and one of the great pleasures was sitting in the evening by the fire in my extensive library collected over 50 years and enhanced by gifts from my mentor, Norman Cockburn that included the complete works of Jung, Steiner and Swedenborg, Toynbee’s Study of History, Sir JG Frazer’s Golden Bough, The Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, The Sacred Books of the East and much more besides. Personal libraries emerged after the advent of printing in the 15th century, and in this hugely engaging book the author tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance ‘studiolo’ as a space for solitude, reflection, refuge and self-cultivation. Among the pioneers in this respect were Petrarch (pp. 29 ff.) and Montaigne (pp. 3 ff., pp. 128 ff.), who housed his library in a tower. The author remarks that for Montaigne, ‘there is a continuum between the interior, interiority, and inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life.’ This corresponds to the emergence of the modern autonomous individual with a right to privacy.

The book is a study of the study, ‘a personal workspace where we think, read, and write.’ The author argues that transhistorically, ‘our inner lives are shaped by our interior spaces’, historically, ‘the studiolo was created in the Renaissance;’ and conceptually that it is a cure or poison for the soul, depending respectively on an attitude of bibliophilia or bibliomania. The book also has a distinct methodological approach bringing in scholarly spaces beyond Europe, and an encouragement to study our own reading habits. As the publication of books exploded between 1500 and 1600 from 9 million to 180 million, so too did censorship with the burning of books as a form of what we would now call narrative control.

Among the personages covered are Faustus, Machiavelli, the Popes, the Medici, Cervantes, Marlowe, Rabelais and Borges. There is a chapter on the Virgin and Saint Jerome in relation to depictions of them reading by great Christian artists such as Raphael and Durer, many of the annunciation – all under the heading of bookishness and sanctity. The author reminds us that Christianity is a religion of the book. Readers are invited to reflect on how they have been shaped by their reading – something that certainly applies to me – and which was inspired by many great thinkers whose books adorn my library shelves, including Radhakrishnan, Eliade, Berdyaev, Russell, Whitehead, Fromm, Steiner, Swedenborg, Wilber, Schweitzer, William James and Thomas Merton. However, the ultimate purpose of all this is not scholarship and knowledge for its own sake, but a distillation of reading in terms of life experience and wisdom.