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The Department of Transnational Italian Studies is delighted to announce a special event with the preeminent and award-winning scholar , titled “A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading across Times and Genders”. The author will join �鶹��Ƶ for her first time to engage in a conversation with Assistant Professor Luca Zipoli about her latest book “” (Harvard University Press, 2023), which was nominated as "Best Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement.

The event is open to everyone. Refreshments and a book signing will follow in the Quita Woodward Room. Please contact lzipoli@brynmawr.edu for more information.

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, the Department of History of Art, Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Praxis. 

Abstract:

The experience of reading is often presented as personal and transformative—a journey of self-discovery and, perhaps, renewal. In conversation with Assistant Professor Luca Zipoli, Lina Bolzoni will examine the classical and early modern roots of this attitude toward the readerly act. Building on Ancient Greek and Roman authors, it was especially between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries that intellectuals came to see books as something more than compendia of knowledge: they could also help readers understand the human condition. As Bolzoni will show, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso all presented reading as a private encounter and a dialogue with the author, instrumental to the construction of the self. 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. Lina Bolzoni will show how also the visual arts cooperated to the development of these themes through a truly interdisciplinary dynamic, since in that same era the vogue for commissioning visual portraits of authors and displaying them in libraries, private museums, and studios ensured that the actual images of the creators were never far from their words, cementing bonds of friendship across barriers of time. Finally, Bolzoni and Zipoli will explore the role of women in this process of cultural transformation, tracing the development of figures of female readers from the Bible to Virginia Woolf, and will discuss the cultural prejudices that often impeded women’s access to the free and intimate realm of reading.

Speaker's bio: 

 is Professor Emerita of Italian literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the British Academy, and the American Philosophical Society. Among her books, translated into many languages, there are four volumes that appeared in Italian all for the Einaudi publishing house and that are now available in English: The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to Saint Bernardino Da Siena (Ashgate, 2004); The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (University of Toronto Press, 2019); A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe (Harvard University Press, 2023), which originated as The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance Delivered at Harvard Villa I Tatti, and The Crystal Heart: Love, Poetry, and Portraiture in Renaissance Italy (Harvey Miller, 2025).