Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance LiteratureThis book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participate in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Before the emergence of the modern concept of technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers recognized the applicability of mechanical practices and objects to some of their most urgent moral, aesthetic, and political questions. The construction, use, and representation of devices including clocks, scientific instruments, stage machinery, and war engines not only reflect but also actively reshape how Renaissance writers define and justify artifice and instrumentality - the reliance upon instruments, mechanical or otherwise, to achieve a particular end. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, scholars and poets including Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, George Chapman, and Gabriel Harvey look to machinery to ponder and dispute all manner of instrumental means, from rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation. |
Contents
Subtle devices Renaissance humanism and its machinery | 1 |
Automatopoesis machinery and courtliness in Renaissance Urbino | 29 |
Artificial motions machinery courtliness and discipline in Renaissance England | 56 |
Inanimate ambassadors the mechanics and politics of mediation | 88 |
The polymechany of Gabriel Harvey | 125 |
Homer in a nutshell George Chapman and the mechanics of perspicuity | 161 |
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according Achilles ambassadors Archimedean Archimedes Artegall Artegall's artifice astrolabe Bacon Baldi Bernardino Baldi Blagrave Blagrave's Book Cambridge Castiglione century Chapman chapter Chaucer's clock Cornelius Drebbel court courtesy literature Courtier courtly cunning demonstrates depicts describes Digges discipline Drebbel Elizabethan engineer English facilità Faerie Queene Federico Commandino Gabriel Harvey globes Hariot Harvey's copy Henry Hephaestus Homer human humanists Ibid ideal Iliad imagines instru intellectual inventions Italian John Dee knowledge Kratzer Lipsius London machinery machines mathematical Mathematicall Jewell means mechanical devices mechanical instruments mechanicians mediation moral motion natural philosophy nature objects Oxford passion Percy perspective philosophy physical Platonic Plutarch practice Preface Prince Ramus readers Renaissance culture Renaissance writers reveal rhetorical Savile scientific secrets Sidney sixteenth sixteenth-century Spenser sprezzatura Stoic Stoicism subtle subtlety Tacitus Talus technical treatises techniques telescopes term texts things Thomas Thomas Digges Thomas Hariot tion translation University Press Urbino virtù virtue writes
Popular passages
Page 300 - Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves.