A Marvelous Solitude

A preeminent Renaissance scholar illuminates early modern encounters with books, in which literature became a portal to self-awareness and miraculous communion between author and reader. The experience of reading is often presented as personal and transformative—a journey of self-discovery and, perhaps, renewal. In A Marvelous Solitude, Lina Bolzoni examines the early modern roots of this attitude toward the readerly act. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, European men of letters increasingly came to see books as something more than compendia of knowledge: they could also help readers understand the human condition. As Bolzoni shows, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso all presented reading as a private encounter and a dialogue with the author. For many Renaissance intellectuals, reading was instrumental to the construction of the self, which was enriched by contact with other learned men. These readers imagined the book...