A marvelous solitude: the art of reading in early modern Europe

Abstract

"The experience of reading, in the modern age, is often presented as intimate, personal, transformative-a journey wherein the reader may both recognize and redesign the self. In A Marvelous Solitude, Lina Bolzoni examines the equivalent rituals and myths that learned men associated with reading between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period, European men of letters-from Petrarch to Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso-began to represent reading itself as a dialogue between reader and author."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Petrarch and the Magical Space of the Library -- The Text as a Body and the Resurrection of the Ancients -- Portraits, or the Desire to see the Author -- Reading, Writing and the Construction of the Self -- Machiavelli's Letter to Vettori -- Montaigne's Tower -- Tasso and the Dangers of Reading.