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 thetechnology that surrounds us, sustains us, and
sometimes perplexes us in the modern world.
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