Humanism, machinery, and Renaissance literature
By: Jessica Wolfe.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Cambridge ; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 305
Subjects: English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Humanism in literature; Machinery in literature; Mechanics in literature; Renaissance -- England; Humanists -- England; England -- Intellectual life -- 16th century
Description: "This 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 242-300) and index.
Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D., Stanford University).