This conversation is a brief follow-up to my recent review of Andrew Hui’s new book, The Library. You can find Andrew Hui’s most recent two books, both from Princeton University Press, here. I have more reflections on the meaning of the Renaissance as a historical period in a review of Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance in The Chronicle of Higher Education, here.
Hi Andrew! I’m excited to chat with you about literary history and, especially, the Renaissance.
One of the things I really admired in your book is the way that you sketch out the afterlives and contemporary implications of Renaissance literature and ideas. But here’s my question. In historical disciplines, scholars have long criticized teleology or—a related, but slightly different charge—presentism: the tendency to interpret and evaluate the past solely in light of the present, to the exclusion of ideas or beliefs that may no longer be relevant, but were very relevant in the period. So how do you think about the relationship between past and present? How can we do justice to what is radically strange in history, the elements that, perhaps, lead nowhere, while also seeking to understand how history shaped our modern world and culture?
Andrew: What a great set of opening questions Julianne - we have lots to talk about!
I think these are all things that we both have been grappling with since our grad school days, and something that is very much alive in our works. Let’s start with this viewpoint. On the one hand you have Friedrich Schlegel saying in the Philosophical Fragments, “Everyone has found in the ancients whatever he needed or wished for; especially himself. And Hegel states even more expansively, “This [ancient] world separates us from ourselves, but then at the same time it grants us the cardinal means of returning to ourselves: we reconcile ourselves with it and thereby find ourselves again in it, but the self which we then find is the one which accords with the tone and universal essence of mind.”
I guess as historically minded scholars we always find parts of the past that interest us. My interest isn’t the same as everyone’s and that’s ok and necessary.
I do believe in viewpoint diversity and pluralism - to use “presentist” terms. And it is the sum of scholarship in the collective that helps us understand the past. There ultimately is “no view from nowhere.”
To be presentist means that we are in the present and can’t escape from the here and now–nor its entanglement with the past that is inescapable. We all must begin from our unique set of historically conditioned coordinates–and we must acknowledge this situatedness.
Another way of thinking about this is that every historical period always thinks about themselves as a relationship between the past and present—whether it’s the Renaissance, late antiquity, the French Revolution or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. I mean from Petrarch to Tallyrand to Mao Zedong to bell hooks - they are thinking about themselves through and against the tradition they inherit (and sometimes try to alter or destroy.)
To be candid about my approach: my temperament and method has always been more about the hermeneutics of charity rather than the hermeneutics of suspicion. I always work on materials that I love, that I value to be deep, uplifting, and exhaustible (and certainly greater than me), and I examine them in the spirit of dialogue rather than confrontation. I see the urgency of social critique but I always try to understand a work before judging it. I never dismantle nor deconstruct for the sake of driving an ideological agenda - I illuminate and reveal to show us what is beautiful about a work of art and the culture from which it springs forth and has survived to our day.
This brings me to something we’re both interested in - the history of the material book and reading. You begin your first book by considering two forms of materialism: Marxist and the practice of literary production in its physical form. One thing I’m clear in my book is that since we study the history of reading of other people, we should also study the way we read ourselves and so people have remarked on the personal, intimate tone of my writing when so much of scholarship is supposedly “impersonal” and “objective.” But with The Study I’ve been more self-conscious (and at times self-confessional) when I talk about my subjective experiences as a student, scholar, and most of all: bibliophile.
From what I can observe, you’re much more interested in sociological, institutional and political infrastructures, whereas I’m more interested in communities and individuals. So maybe I care more about Gemeinshaft rather than Gesellschaft, I guess.
What about you? Are you more interested in the alterity or similarities of historical epochs? By nature I’m more of a lumper than a splitter, my mind is more allegorical, associative, analogical rather than analytical.
Julianne: What a terrific—and characteristic—response! I guess what I’d say is that I’m interested in the patterns of similarity and difference that are inevitable in historical narrative, especially explanatory narratives. To seek an explanation requires continuity of focus, but it also requires genuine change to get you from point A to point B.
I absolutely agree that we’re all likely to see different things in literature and history and that this is not only enriching but essential. If cultural history is to be for everyone, it will be pluralistic, at least up to a point. But I also think that as our connection to cultural history weakens, historically grounded literary scholarship becomes more difficult. It becomes easy to lapse into either presentism or antiquarianism, seeing only the present in the literary works of the past, or imagining literary works severed from their connection to a broader cultural arc.
For me, material history (or historical materialism) is the best way of getting at an explanatory narrative that makes our own histories, including intellectual and cultural histories, cohere. It’s the set of pressures that shape possibilities of action: people need to eat and have children, societies need to be reproduced. But the way we work, eat, and reproduce has been transformed in the last few centuries—I would say especially from the Renaissance, and the rise of capitalism, onward.
What could better help us understand the intellectual implications of that transformation than literature? Literature, trite as it is to say, is about what life means, an idea that I think we can take in a bluntly literal sense without going too far wrong.
But that brings me to another question: for you, why the Renaissance today? And what is the Renaissance, anyway, in a global world? Two vast questions, so feel free to pick and choose.
Andrew: Great question - so much to talk about, so little time. Let me begin from the end of your reply and then move backward. Both of us are early modernists (or Renaissance specialists, I don’t want to rehash this debate between terms, early modern vs. Renaissance, both have their virtues and defects). But I want to gently resist what might be called, let’s say, “period exceptionalism”: The belief, deeply held by every academic, that history peaked during their specialty—and that the rest is either anticipation or epilogue. There are always clever people who say, my period, my genre, my sub-field can explain the ills of the present better than anyone, we’re living in the age of the late Roman Republic, this is a neo-medieval ages, we have never left the Romantic or Victorian era. We scholars always have a “chrono-bubble” or “period fallacy” – living intellectually inside the sealed epistemic bubble of your chosen century. “Well, as a Renaissance scholar, let me tell you why everything today comes from 1517...”
But I know you know that as well. Which brings me to the other point you raised, “patterns of similarity and difference”—this is also to imply that we have a good sense of what the present is as a whole, when I think our knowledge of what is happening right now, is as myopic, fragmented, and perspectival as our knowledge of 1517. (And in passing, I’d love to hear more about what you think “material history” is.) This is like saying, a professor of theology knows alot what’s happening in 1938 Germany or a peasant has a clearer sense of the world-shaking importance of the Cultural Revolution in 1960s China than us. There’s an emic and etic dimension to studying things - i.e. people inside the culture knows certain things that outsiders don’t; people outside the culture knows and intuit things that insiders don’t. None of us really knows what’s happening in May 2025, what led us to this moment or where we’re going.
This is related to the question about “presentism or antiquarianism.” The best source to think about this, imho, is Nietzsche’s early essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of the History for Life.” which provocatively says that sometimes an excess of history is detrimental to intellectual formation: it makes us look backwards and too fixated on the past rather than move and create things for the future: “Historical education is wholesome and promising for the future only in the service of a powerful new life-giving influence.” Sometimes when I’m in Europe, I see cities and villages spending so much time on historical preservation and conservation that they have no more money or energy to build new things. In Tuscany or Umbria, for example, what significant work of architecture has been produced after 2000?
On the other hand, just last week marked the closure of Yale-NUS College and the big tempest in the little teacup was that the librarians at NUS marked almost 10,000 books (out of 45,000) in our library for elimination (hauled away in garbage trucks to be shredded) and they ordered part-time student workers in the library to manually penknife more than 1000 DVDs – many of the Criterion Collection–so that they are inoperable. This for me is a tiny but terrible crime against culture. Anyways, I’m writing a little commentary on this.
But in any case, to bring up another question I’d like to talk to you about: not only the excess of history but the excess of culture - there is just too much to read, too much to learn. How do you juggle your scholarship, your creative work, family, life, sustenance, absorbing the old and new materials (novels, non-fiction, film, music, traveling, archives, museums) - when there is just so little time? Sometimes I look around my study and I have pangs of regret that oh, I haven’t read this yet, oh, I really need to reread this, I’ve forgotten almost everything that happened in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, etc. . . . and sometimes I feel this paralysis of choice whenever I walk into a bookstore or library and there’s just too much stuff out there . . . .
Julianne: I completely agree that we don’t necessarily have a fuller grasp of the present than the past; if anything, the reverse. By “patterns of similarity and difference,” I meant only that historical explanations have to attempt to describe what has changed and what has remained the same—whether you’re discussing a period of five years or five hundred years. In fact, I think the very attempt to form historical explanations is clarifying for understanding our own world, or whatever corner of it we’re looking at. It forces you to move onto a higher plane of abstraction, to define categories, to try to take a distanced view of ourselves (impossible to do fully, but there are gradations).
You invoke Nietzsche on the problems of too much history; we could also think of his reflections on forgetting as an enabling condition of thought and action in the Genealogy of Morals, or Borges’s treatment of this idea in “Funes the Memorious,” a fable about a man who’s incapable of abstraction because he remembers everything. Historical narratives can be a solution to this problem, though, rather than an example of it. By that I mean that philosophically informed narratives help us to forget in this specialized sense: to figure out which details we can bracket in order to see the whole of the landscape better. Maps, not territories.
Perhaps that’s why I’m more sympathetic to the chauvinism that all period specialists have about their periods! I want scholars of the Warring States period or the rise of Islam or the Black Death or the French Revolution or Romanticism to tell me how the events or ideas in their period explain our world. And I’ll make the case for the Renaissance, as an age that saw a watershed in literacy with new media technology, the rise of market-based economies, and the first, brutal wave of globalization.
In terms of our current cultural predicament, I might think not so much of memory and forgetting, as of attention and ignoring. Like you, and like everyone, I feel my attention being pulled in too many directions. The problem isn’t just a profusion of books and writing, but a lack of criteria of relevance: anything could matter, which at a certain point means that nothing does, at least not very much. Like theories of history, we need powerful theories of art to define and delimit relevance; on the social plane, we need groups, coteries, scenes, and institutions, which, among other things, are all ways of channeling attention. Lots of possibilities, but easier said than done!
Finally, I had to say something about the events you mention at Yale-NUS. Shocking! I guess I’ll have to read your piece to learn more. There really is always more to discuss…
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