Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature - Softcover

Wolfe, Jessica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521123763 ISBN 13: 9780521123761

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

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. This book explores how machinery and the practice of mechanics participated in the intellectual culture of Renaissance humanism. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, writers (including Francis Bacon and Edmund Spenser) turned to machinery to consider instrumental means in a diverse range that spans rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.

About this title

Book 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. Harnessing the discipline of mechanics to their literary and philosophical concerns, writers including Francis Bacon and Edmund Spenser look to machinery to ponder and dispute all manner of instrumental means, from rhetoric and pedagogy to diplomacy and courtly dissimulation.

About the Author

Jessica Wolfe is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521123763
• ISBN 13: 9780521123761
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320