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 as a mirror image of its author, with whom they held a secret affinity. In their letters to one another, humanists described the book as a body, reflecting the notion that reading literature placed its author in the room with oneself. Reading the work of a deceased author became akin to a necromantic rite, as the writers of bygone times were resurrected and placed in contemporary conversation. The vogue for hanging portraits of authors in libraries and studios ensured that the image of the creator was never far from his words, cementing bonds of friendship across barriers of time. These myths—charming, fragile, and powerful—invested the readerly encounter with miraculous properties that lingered in the hearts of the Romantics. And something of those wonders persists today, in the intimate feeling that reading yet provokes.

The Renaissance in the 19th Century examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European critique: a commentary on and reshaping of a nineteenth-century present that is perceived as deeply problematic. The revival, located between historical nostalgia and critique of the contemporary world, swept the humanistic disciplines-history, literature, music, art, architecture, collecting. The Italian Renaissance revival marked the oeuvre of a group of figures as diverse as J.-D. Ingres and E. M. Forster, Heinrich Geymuller and Adolf von Hildebrand, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, H. H. Richardson and R. M. Rilke, Giosue Carducci and De Sanctis. Though some perceived the Italian Renaissance as a Golden Age, a model for the present, others cast it as a negative example, contrasting the resurgence of the arts with the decadence of society and the loss of an ethical and political conscience. The triumphalist model had its detractors, and the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first have appeared. Through a series of essays by a group of international scholars, volume editors Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne recover the multidimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of, and commentary on the connections between the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century modernity. The essays look from within (by Italians) and from without (by foreigners, expatriates, travelers, and scholars), comparing different visions and interpretations.

Lina Bolzoni's impressive study of the memory culture of sixteenth-century Italy appears here for the first time in English translation. Since its original incarnation as La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell'età della stampa, published by Einaudi of Torino in 1995, Bolzoni's study has been praised by critics and ranked with the classic texts in its field - those by Paolo Rossi, Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers. The book takes as its starting point a striking paradox: that the antique tradition of the art of memory - created by an oral culture - reached its moment of greatest diffusion during an age that saw the birth of the printed book. Bolzoni's examination of this phenomenon, in which archaic and modern elements came together in a precarious equilibrium, reveals the profound ties that existed at the time between memory and creativity, and between words and images. Drawing on the multiplicity of practices that relied on techniques of memory, Bolzoni presents diagrams, cipher alphabets, rebuses and emblemlike pictures characteristic of the late-Medieval and early-modern periods, indicating their use for literary games and preaching. In doing so, she skilfully reconstructs a particular mentality, a way of apprehending words and images that was of central importance for a long period of time but that has since been forgotten.