{"product_id":"a-marvelous-solitude-9780674660236","title":"A Marvelous Solitude","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery—and of communion between authors and book lovers—has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Marvelous Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e is a marvelous book: erudite, accessible, elegant. Bolzoni focuses on the intricate web of myths and metaphors that early modern thinkers spun around the activity of reading, yet there is much here that still whispers to our experience as readers today. -- Virginia Cox, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Prodigious Muse\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis stimulating book offers a vivid survey of illustrious readers from Petrarch to Proust, woven in a dazzling verbal and visual tapestry that will delight the mind and eye of contemporaries still dwelling in the Gutenberg Galaxy. -- David Marsh, author of \u003ci\u003eGiannozzo Manetti: The Life of a Florentine Humanist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLina Bolzoni’s magisterial book is about reading, but it’s also about writers presenting themselves as readers who converse with the past, other texts, and other worlds through books—and then write their way out of these ‘theaters of reading.’ How many readers emerged as writers from the crucible of these reflections? How many more will by reading this book? -- Alexander Nagel, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Controversy of Renaissance Art\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLina Bolzoni’s love affair with books is palpable in these pages dedicated to a remarkable cohort of writers and readers from Petrarch to Proust. Books in early modernity took on lives of their own, as readers saw in them opportunities for dialogue with the absent and the dead—and were often inspired to add to the conversation themselves. Bolzoni demonstrates that the marvelous—if occasionally risky—thing about the solitude of reading is that it’s never solitary, but full of friends. -- Jane Tylus, author of \u003ci\u003eReclaiming Catherine of Siena\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Harvard University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48865491550551,"sku":"9780674660236","price":30.56,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780674660236.jpg?v=1722274218","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/a-marvelous-solitude-9780674660236","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}