The Renaissance Computer : Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print

ISBN-13: 9780415220644 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 224 str.

Neil Rhodes; Jonathan Sawday

Opis

In the 15th century the printing press was the new technology. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge. As early as 1500 there were already 20 million books in circulation in Europe. How did this rapid explosion of ideas impact upon the evolution of new disciplines? This work looks at the development of new methods of information storage and retrieval which took place at the very beginning of print culture. And it asks some crucial questions about the intellectual conditions of our own digital age. An array of leading experts in Renaissance culture explore topics of significance today, including: the contribution of knowledge technologies to state formulation and national identity; the effect of multimedia, orality and memory on education; and the importance of the visual display of information and how search engines reflect and direct ways of thinking.

Recenzje

'The latest in a series . . . this pioneering study . . . about how the emerging technology of printing revolutionised the concept of knowledge in Europe . . . is actually a rather fascinating bibliographical analysis.' - Steven Poole, The Guardian

Spis treści

Introduction 1. The Silence of the Archive and the Noise of Cyberspace 2. Towards the Renaissance Computer 3. Ramus, Pedagogy and Technology 4. Textual Icons: Reading Early Modern Illustrations 5. The Early Modern Search Engine: Indices, Titlepages, Marginalia and Contents 6. National and International Knowledge: the Limits of the Histories of Nations 7. Arachne's Web: Intertextual Mythography and the Renaissance Actaeon 8. The Daughters of Memory: Thomas Heywood's Gunaikeion and the Female Computer 9. Pierre de La Primaudaye's French Academy: Growing Encyclopedic 10. Structure in the Wilderness Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne's Cabinets of Curiosity 11. Articulate Networks: the Self, the Book and the World

O autorze

Neil Rhodes is Reader in English Literature at the university of St Andrews. His previous publications include The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (1992), John Donne: Selected Prose (1987), and Elizabethan Grotesque (1980). Jonathan Sawday is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Strathclyde University. He is author of The Body Emblazoned (1995), and co-editor of Literature and the English Civil War.