臺大外文系學術演講

NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium

Title: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries

Speaker: Prof. Andrew Hui (National University of Singapore)

Moderator: Prof. Laurent Cases (National Taiwan University)

Time: 15:30-17:00, May 13, 2026

Venue: B208, NTU Humanities Hall (臺大人文館B208室)

ABSTRACT

With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe’s cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo—a “little studio”—and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.

Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces 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 the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly 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.

BIO：

Andrew Hui is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Theatre Studies at National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in comparative literature from Princeton in 2009 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford before moving to Singapore, where he has taught since 2012. He is the prolific author of The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (Fordham, 2016), A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, 2019), a new book that is the topic of his presentation at NTU, and two additional forthcoming titles.