Sharing the Medici Archive with the World.

MAP FORUM RETURNS Tuesday, 13 January 2026 @ 5pm EST/11pm CET

In this lecture, Andrew Hui will trace how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own little intimate retreats of the mind. He will contrasts them with 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. Andrew Hui is a literary scholar and cultural historian and the author of The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter, and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.