NYRB: In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment

Catherine Nicholson writes:

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 came 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 house and a modest robe, they require no drink or food.”

…Occasionally, one senses some strain in the narrative—a hint of how the self-flattering mythology of reading might compensate, or fail to compensate, for the inability to find other sources of purpose and fulfillment.