A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe
by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup. Harvard University Press, 246 pp., $39.95
Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England
by J. K. Barret. Cornell University Press, 249 pp., $58.95; $34.95 (paper)
“I daily listen to your words with more attention than one would believe, and perhaps I shall not be thought impertinent in wishing to be heard by you,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch in 1348. His addressee was the Roman philosopher Seneca, who had died nearly thirteen centuries before. Petrarch’s practice of writing to long-dead authors epitomizes—and helped to initiate—the essential double movement of humanist imitatio, the exchange by which schoolboys and scholars across late medieval and early modern Europe formed their ideas, values, images, tastes, and turns of phrase along the lines of an antiquity they were just beginning to regard (but had not yet begun to speak of) as “classical.”
The American scholar Thomas Greene in The Light in Troy, his 1982 study of humanism’s intimate relation to and sense of estrangement from the ancient world, called imitatio came “a literary technique that was also a pedagogic method and a critical battleground.” Whom to take as one’s exemplars and how closely to follow them, which models to embrace and which to avoid or improve upon, were subjects of fervent debate. In theory, emulating the best of what had been written fostered expressiveness; “in practice,” Greene allows, “it led not infrequently to sterility.” But as Petrarch’s letter to Seneca suggests, the rewards of imitatio were perhaps primarily emotional: a communion with other minds that fortified readers against the disappointments of the present. Of his library at Vaucluse, near the papal court at Avignon, Petrarch wrote:
Here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those…who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings…. I am where I wish to be.
In A Marvelous Solitude, her new book on Renaissance humanists’ romance with reading, the Italian scholar Lina Bolzoni channels the allure, for Petrarch and those who came after him, of a life in books, its pleasures “more intimate and more intense than the satisfaction afforded by other worldly goods.” But such intimacy at a cost: “A sense of being unsuited to one’s times, a feeling, almost, of extraneousness and alienation.”
There is often a whiff of misanthropy about Petrarch’s passion for books. In the fourteenth century, before the invention of movable type, books were artisanal objects, and even the simplest were inscribed and bound by hand. But once acquired, Petrarch observes, they asked little of their possessors; with books, unlike houseguests, “there is no tedium, no expense, no complaints, no murmurs, no envy, no deceit…. They are satisfied with the smallest room in your
