Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature

ISBN-13: 9780521831871 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 318 str.

Jessica Wolfe

Opis

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. This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participated in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, writers (including Francis Bacon and Edmund Spenser) turned to machinery to consider instrumental means in a diverse range that spans rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.

Recenzje

'Individual scholars interested in the idea of mechanism or the mechanical in the Renaissance, or more generally in history of our understanding of machines, will find it an extremely useful place to start or continue their studies …' Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction: subtle devices: renaissance humanism and its machinery; 1. Automatopoesis: machinery and courtliness in renaissance Urbino; 2. Artificial motions: machinery, courtliness, and discipline in renaissance England; 3. Inanimate ambassadors: the mechanics and politics of mediation; 4. The polymechany of Gabriel Harvey; 5. Homer in a nutshell: Chapman and the mechanics of perspicuity; 6. Inhumanism: Spenser's iron man; Conclusion.