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基本説明
In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Sawady investigates at what point machines and technology began to have an impact on the cultural consciousness and imagination of Europe. By engaging with the poetry, philosophy, art and engineering of the European Renaissance, he explores the lost world of the machine in the pre-industrial culture of the time - and helps explain our own attitudes towards technology today.
Full Description
At what point did machines and technology begin to have an impact on the cultural consciousness and imagination of Europe? How was this reflected through the art and literature of the time? Was technology a sign of the fall of humanity from its original state of innocence or a sign of human progress and mastery over the natural world? In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Jonathan Sawday investigates these questions and more by engaging with the poetry, philosophy, art, and engineering of the period to find the lost world of the machine in the pre-industrial culture of the European Renaissance.
The aesthetic and intellectual dimension of these machines appealed to familiar figures such as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Montaigne, and Leonardo da Vinci as well as to a host of lesser known writers and artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This intellectual engagement with machines in the European Renaissance gave rise to new attitudes towards gender, work and labour, and even fostered the new sciences of artificial life and reason which would be pursued by figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz in the seventeenth century.
Writers, philosophers and artists had mixed and often conflicting reactions to technology, reflecting a paradoxical attitude between modern progress and traditional values. Underpinning the enthusiastic creation of a machine-driven world, then, were stories of loss and catastrophe. These contradictory attitudes are part of the legacy of the European Renaissance, just as much as the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of John Milton. And this historical legacy helps to explain many of our own attitudes towards the technology that surrounds us, sustains us, and sometimes perplexes us in the modern world.
Contents
Contents Contents i Epigraphs ii List of Plates iv Preface and Acknowledgments vii
The Machine in the Margins 1
Philosophy, Power and Politics in Renaissance Technology 36
The Turn of the Screw: Machines, Books, and Bodies 91
Women and Wheels: Gender and the Machine in the Renaissance 172
'Nature Wrought:' Artifice, Illusion, and Magical Mechanics 226
Reasoning Engines: The Instrumental Imagination in the 293
Seventeenth Century
Chapter Seven: Milton and the Engine 372
The Machine Stops 427
Notes Index
