Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine

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ISBN: 9780415350624 | 041535062X
Cover: Paperback
Copyright: 1/24/2008

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How did men and women in earlier ages respond to their technologies? In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Jonathan Sawday explores poetry, philosophy, art, and engineering to reveal the lost world of the machine in the preindustrial culture of the European Renaissance.

List of illustrations	p. xi
Preface and acknowledgements	p. xv
The Renaissance machine and its discontents	p. 1
The world of Techne	p. 1
A world run upon wheels: the sound of the Renaissance	p. 4
Windmills and watermills	p. 6
Shame	p. 18
Philosophy, power, and politics in Renaissance technology	p. 31
'The vital humour of the terrestrial machine'	p. 31
A water-driven world	p. 34
Watching machines with Montaigne	p. 38
Movement and the philosophy of machines	p. 47
Machines and social power	p. 54
The Renaissance megamachine: Rome 1585-6	p. 58
The turn of the screw: machines, books, and bodies	p. 70
Of alienation and pins	p. 72
'What is't o'clock?': clock time and social status	p. 76
Print and mechanical culture	p. 78
The birth of the Renaissance machine	p. 83
Georgius Agricola and the invention of mechanical labour	p. 86
The syntax of the machine	p. 96
The mechanical world of Agostino Ramelli	p. 102
The body of the machine	p. 108
Textual engines	p. 111
Perpetual motions	p. 116
Women and wheels: gender and the machine in the Renaissance	p. 125
Rosie the Riveter	p. 125
The Spinners	p. 128
Wheels	p. 137
Rotary punishment	p. 139
The wheel of Fortune	p. 150
'A thing made for Alexander'	p. 160
'Nature wrought': artifice, illusion, and magical mechanics	p. 166
Metallic fantasies	p. 166
Fabricating nature	p. 172
Mechanical illusions	p. 183
'Bodies without souls'	p. 185
Mechanical women	p. 199
Reasoning engines: the instrumental imagination in the seventeenth century	p. 207
Buying an instrument	p. 207
Francis Bacon and the reform of mechanism	p. 210
Seeing with machines	p. 216
Robert Hooke's artificial bodies	p. 221
The second Adam	p. 228
Clockwork reason	p. 232
The calculating machine	p. 237
Mechanical theology	p. 242
Political machines	p. 245
Sex machines	p. 248
Milton and the engine	p. 257
Mechanical language	p. 257
Mechanical sight	p. 259
The semi-omnipotent engine	p. 265
The idea of the engine	p. 270
Milton and industry	p. 275
Milton and the machine	p. 284
The machine stops	p. 294
The interrupted idyll of Andrew Marvell	p. 294
The happy return	p. 299
Conclusion: The machine stops	p. 310
Notes	p. 319
Index	p. 385
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine

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