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.

This volume features original essays exploring the automaton - from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine - in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Unfolding as a series of materially oriented studies ranging from chairs, machines and doors to trees, animals and food, this book retells the story of Renaissance personhood as one of material relations and embodied experience, rather than of emergent notions of individuality and freedom.

The first study of legal reform and literature in early modern EnglandThis book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the Gesta Grayorum, Donne's 'Satyre V', and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character. Key FeaturesReevaluates canonical writers in light of developments in legal historical research, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to works Collects an extensive variety of legal, political, and literary sources to reconstruct the discourse on early modern legal reform, providing an introduction to a topic that is currently underrepresented in early modern legal cultural studiesAnalyses the laws own vulnerability to individual agency.

Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution: Forms of Proof argues that the rise of mechanical science in the seventeenth century had a profound impact on both language and literature. To the extent that new ideas about things were accompanied by new attitudes toward words, what we commonly regard as the “scientific revolution” inevitably bore literary dimensions as well. Literary tropes and forms underwent tremendous reassessment in the seventeenth century, and early modern science was shaped just as powerfully by contest over the place of literary figures, from personification and metaphor to anamorphosis and allegory. In their rejection of teleological explanations of natural motion, for instance, early modern philosophers often disputed the value of personification, a figural projection of interiority onto what was becoming increasingly a mechanical world. And allegory—a dominant mode of literature from the late Middle Ages until well into the Renaissance—became “the vice of those times,” as Thomas Rymer described it in 1674. This book shows that its acute devaluation was possible only in conjunction with a distinctively modern physics. Analyzing writings by Sidney, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, and more, it asserts that the scientific revolution was a literary phenomenon, just as the literary revolution was also a scientific one.

Revised throughout, the book includes: a new introduction which focuses attention on what is specific to literature's treatment of the human (as epitomised by Shakespeare); a section drawing on new work on literary genres as different forms of engagement

This book argues that new groups and radically new concepts of group identity emerged throughout the world during the Renaissance.

Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. --

In this revised and greatly expanded edition of the Companion, 80 scholars come together to offer an original and far-reaching assessment of English Renaissance literature and culture. A new edition of the best-selling Companion to English Renaissance Literature, revised and updated, with 22 new essays and 19 new illustrations Contributions from some 80 scholars including Judith H. Anderson, Patrick Collinson, Alison Findlay, Germaine Greer, Malcolm Jones, Arthur Kinney, James Knowles, Arthur Marotti, Robert Miola and Greg Walker Unrivalled in scope and its exploration of unfamiliar literary and cultural territories the Companion offers new readings of both ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ texts Features essays discussing material culture, sectarian writing, the history of the body, theatre both in and outside the playhouses, law, gardens, and ecology in early modern England Orientates the beginning student, while providing advanced students and faculty with new directions for their research All of the essays from the first edition, along with the recommendations for further reading, have been reworked or updated

Challenging the artificial divide between technological studies and cultural history, Engines of the Imagination traces the story of the imaginative encounter with machines and machinery in the European Renaissance.