A marvelous solitude: the art of reading in early modern Europe

"The experience of reading, in the modern age, is often presented as intimate, personal, transformative-a journey wherein the reader may both recognize and redesign the self. In A Marvelous Solitude, Lina Bolzoni examines the equivalent rituals and myths that learned men associated with reading between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period, European men of letters-from Petrarch to Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso-began to represent reading itself as a dialogue between reader and author."--