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Look Inside Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature

Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature

  • Date Published: December 2009
  • availability: Available
  • format: Paperback
  • isbn: 9780521123761

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About the Authors
  • This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participate in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Before the emergence of the concept of technology, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers recognised 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.

    • A subtle rethinking of the relationship between humanistic and scientific culture during the Renaissance
    • Sheds light on these issues through a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, the book uses literary history, intellectual history, history of science, and history of art
    • This book will be of interest to literary, cultural and scientific historians alike
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    Reviews & endorsements

    '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

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    Product details

    • Date Published: December 2009
    • format: Paperback
    • isbn: 9780521123761
    • length: 320 pages
    • dimensions: 229 x 152 x 18 mm
    • weight: 0.47kg
    • availability: Available
  • Table of Contents

    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.

  • Author

    Jessica Wolfe, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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