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Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study
Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place? Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and finds a space where words mediate the world and the self.
Sant’Andrea in Percussina lies about ten kilometers south of Florence, nestled in the proverbially beautiful Tuscan landscape, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees, wild rosemary patches, and soft rolling hills. He lists all the wonderful things that happen in a typical day: he spends his afternoons at leisure, in the garden or horseback riding in the countryside; in the evenings, he wines and dines at home, or he goes out; at night, he reads: “I’ve managed to get a lot of history books, especially those of the Romans. Notice the sheer corporeality of his images: the microtextures of daily life, the clothing, the food, the senses, the ritual motions, the affects of boredom, shame, and anxiety transformed into the state of what contemporary psychologists call “flow”, or deep absorption in an activity.
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