Andrew Hui's "The Study"

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the study is a reading of a beautiful painting of the Annunciation by Domenico Ghirlandaio. I do an analysis of its formal pictorial elements and how they gesture to deeper theological significance. I then talk about how 'volume' means both a space and a book. This is within my Chapter 3, “Bookishness and Sanctity,” which explores how the Renaissance iconology of the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome depicted both saints as bookworms, thereby elevating bibliophilia into a form of holiness. This is part of my broader argument about the genesis of the personal library, or studiolo, in early modern Europe.

I’m delighted that Marshal invited me to do the Page 99 Test again (I did it for my previous book A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter). The Page 99 Test is one of those charming literary parlor games that flatters our sense of the microcosmic—the idea that a single page, plucked like a Tarot card, can reveal a book’s “true” shape. It’s deliciously self-deluded, like squinting at the corner of a Vermeer and deciding you’ve understood the early modern Dutch Republic (although...maybe there is something to that...). There’s a fractal allure to it, certainly, but why not page 42, or 287? Perhaps analysis always lies in the interstices between the allegorical and the arbitrary.

And yet, perhaps it is fitting that it is page 99—a number with its own mystic aura—that gives us the Annunciation, and with it, the Virgin Mary herself. For believers, the Virgin is the font of all honors and virtues, the sublime mediator between heaven and earth. How charming, then, that she should appear at the axis mundi of the text, the book’s golden mean—page 99—the liminal point from which everything unfolds. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s the kind of coincidence medieval thinkers would have loved: neither wholly arbitrary nor entirely rational, existing in the space where grace and geometry intersect.

Learn more about The Study at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Theory of the Aphorism.

--Marshal Zeringue