Renaissance Bookworms: Study and Recreation in the Age of Private Reading

In Renaissance Bookworms, I study two principal modes of reading practiced by men and women of letters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rather than positioning reading on a scale that stretches from the pleasurable to the instructive (as in the Horatian formula); from the profound to the superficial (as medieval theories had it); from the complex to the simplistic (as today’s reading manuals tend to do); my dissertation argues that the humanists conceived reading as a delicate equilibrium between study and recreation, work and rest. The question of what, where, and how to read therefore hinged on specific physical circumstances such as the location, the time of the day, the nature of the book, the readers’ mood and energy, and even their medical condition. By inserting these factors into the study of reading, my dissertation calls into question some common preconceptions regarding humanistic literary activity that persist to this day in the humanities. I thus suggest forsaking adjectives such as “ideal” or “good” in regard to reading, and instead view it as an activity practiced by people of flesh and blood and performed in multiple ways: distractedly and attentively, with enthusiasm or culpability, comfortably or under constraints. Under this perspective, I examine the ways in which Christine de Piza, Marguerite de Navarre, Michel de Montaigne as well as a Jewish Rabbi named Yoseph Karo navigated their reading schedule.