Engines of the Imagination

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? 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.

Jonathan Sawday is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He has taught at universities in Britain, Ireland, and the United States. As well as writing many articles and essays on Renaissance literature and culture, he is the author of the The Body Emblazoned (Routledge, 1995) and co-editor (with Tom Healy) of Literature and the English Civil War (1990), and (with Neil Rhodes) The Renaissance Computer (Routledge, 2000).

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