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This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King's Research Portal At This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ SUBTLE ENGINES: THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF EARLY MODERN MACHINES Giersberg, Tullia Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 SUBTLE ENGINES: THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF EARLY MODERN MACHINES TULLIA GIERSBERG DOCTORAL THESIS SUBMITTED IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH KING’S COLLEGE LONDON AUGUST 2014 ABSTRACT Early modern machine culture bridges a gap between mechanical and rhetorical forms of wit – between technē and poiēsis or the sciences and the arts – and as such constitutes an important repository for our understanding of the period’s polysemous forms of literary production. This thesis uncovers and investigates some of the as- yet little examined textual lives of an eclectic array of instruments, engines, machines, and mechanisms in the works of Spenser, Jonson, Milton and their contemporaries, exploring the literary, political, and religious implications of mathematical instrument-making, the rise of the new science, and the advent of the mechanist philosophy. Both as metaphors and as rhetorical strategies, machines – and the narratives of cultural authority attaching to them – offer writers and inventors a means not only of intervening in public controversy, but also and especially of creating new and various forms of political agency. Mathematical instruments exert a particularly powerful influence on the political imagination of Tudor England, I argue in my first chapter. Throughout the period, the elaborate iconographies of globe and astrolabe in particular speak to us of the making – and expose the limits – of contemporary political fictions, surviving as extravagant records of personal and national ambition. For Edmund Spenser, contemporary machines and engines hold important potential as metapoetic devices. In The Faerie Queene, a number of ‘subtile engins’ closely allied with interrelated notions of linguistic and spiritual artifice serve to distance the poem’s moral allegory from the mechanisms of its own production, enabling Spenser to reflect upon and mediate the vexed politics of literary invention in post-Reformation England. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, conceives of machines as rhetorical strategies for 2 socio-political commentary. His unique and lasting interest in – and hostility towards – Cornelis Drebbel and the magico-mechanical marvels he introduced at the Jacobean court represents primarily a response to changing attitudes towards cultural authority during the early Stuart reign, precipitated by new technologies and ideas about the nature of invention on the one hand, and by the advent of Galilean astronomy and a number of spectacular visual technologies on the other. Early modern prosthetics and emergent visions of the Cartesian body- machine inaugurate surrogate kinds of textual agency in the political and religious polemics of the Civil War. In Royalist invective, historical, medical and proverbial attitudes towards prosthetic hands in particular serve to restore broken Royalist identities, sustain textual critiques of Parliamentarian rebellion, and ultimately enable the post-Restoration rewriting of the Interregnum as an artificial graft upon the nation’s body politic. At the same time, various existing and emergent notions of the early modern automaton give rise to a polemical counter-narrative in the political and religious prose of John Milton, who seeks to exert authorial control over the monarchy’s self-validating rhetorical mechanisms by implicating the Caroline state in the machine’s ontological determinacy. For him, as for the other writers I study, to uncover the rhetorical potential of machines is to (re)discover the animating power of the written word. 3 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7 NOTE ON THE TEXT 9 INTRODUCTION 10 PART 1 1. THE POLITICS OF MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENTATION IN TUDOR ENGLAND 27 2. ‘SUBTILE ENGINS’: SPENSER AND THE MECHANICS OF ALLEGORY IN THE FAERIE QUEENE 80 PART 2 3. CORNELIS DREBBEL, BEN JONSON, AND THE POETICS OF INVENTION 122 PART 3 4. ‘AN INSTRUMENTE, OF INSTRUMENTES’: MECHANICAL HANDS AND TEXTUAL AGENCY IN THE ROYALIST POLEMICS OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR AND INTERREGNUM 184 5. MILTON’S MECHANICAL MEN: IDEAS OF THE AUTOMATON IN THE POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS PROSE 231 CONCLUSION 271 BIBLIOGRAPHY 277 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe more than I can convey here to the many people who have made the writing of this thesis possible. Its achievement, such as it is, is theirs as much as it is my own. I would like to thank my academic supervisors Hannah Crawforth and Patricia Palmer for giving my love of all things mechanical an academic home and for steering it in the right direction. Their critical insight, inexhaustible stores of knowledge, and practical know-how have been invaluable over the past four years. I am immensely grateful to them for allowing me the greatest latitude imaginable, for giving their time freely, generously, and promptly whenever it was required, and, most of all, for their infinite patience. To Hannah Crawforth’s delightful sons, Lucian and Rufus: thank you for reminding me that, invariably, a smile is the best answer. Many warm thanks are due to Gordon McMullan and especially to Sonia Massai for making me feel welcome at King’s and for taking an interest in my work. John Lavagnino and Chloe Porter gave me the confidence to go on when it counted most. For this I cannot thank them enough. Research for this thesis was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. To a substantial scholarship and several conference grants made available by the English Department and the Graduate School I owe the very best postgraduate experience anyone could have hoped for. And it is with great humility that I acknowledge the financial support my mother and grandmother provided throughout. It has given me nine wonderful years in the UK, which has become a home away from home. The debt of gratitude I owe them is one that I will never be able to repay. 5 Thank you also to the many wonderful people in the English department at King’s for stimulating conversations, shared worries, and much laughter: Hannah August, Ellie Bass, Sarah Crofton, Hannah Leah Crummé, Maria Damkjaer, Mary Henes, Jordan Kistler, Sarah Lewis, Jennifer Lo, Brian Murray, Megan Murray- Pepper, Philippe Roesle, Ola Sakowska, Mary Shannon, Fariha Shaikh, Kate Symondson, Will Tattersdill, and many more. The same goes for the old friends, new friends, and young friends who have demonstrated infinite patience with me over the last few years: Lydia Garcia Schmidt and Ulf Schmidt, whose selflessness, boundless energy, and constant friendship remind me of what is important. Aurelia Vowinckel, Jörg Vowinckel-Ewald, and their beautiful son Kasimir: I feel privileged that you consider me part of your extended family. And on this side of the Channel, Alex Koper, Elizabeth Koper, and family: thank you for befriending a stranger in a strange country. I would never have embarked upon this academic journey if it had not been for the many excellent teachers at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, Cologne, The University of Glasgow, and UBC Vancouver, whose enthusiasm, kindness, and support I have been extremely lucky to have enjoyed. Particular thanks are due to Leif Ehlers and Brigid Hoffmann for making me fall in love with the English language, to Robert Maslen for introducing me to the wonders of The Faerie Queene and its mechanical men, which really started this project, and to David Newell, for his boundless enthusiasm. I owe everything to my mother, Dr Sigrid Giersberg, who taught me that I can. 6 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1 Emery Molyneux (d. 1598), terrestrial globe (1592 [1603]), Middle Temple Library, London. Image: © paranoidnotandroid, Wikimedia Commons. Licensed for redistribution under Creative Commons license CC-BY-2.0. 37 2 Thomas Gemini (1515-1562), astrolabe (c. 1551-1552). Repro ID: D9216-1. Image: © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Gabb Collection. 52 3 Thomas Gemini (1515-1562), astrolabe (c. 1552), brass, Observatoire Royale de Belgique, Uccle, Belgium (IC 450). Image: Gerard L’Estrange Turner, Elizabethan Instrument Makers: The Origins of the London Trade in Precision Instrument Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Plate 2 (detail). 54 4 James Kynvyn (c. 1550-1615), astronomical compendium (1593), gilded brass, The British Museum, London (M&ME 1866, 2-21.1). Image: © Trustees of the British Museum. 59 5 Thomas Gemini (1515-1562), astrolabe (1559), gilded brass, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (Inv. no. 42223). Image: © 2006 Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. 65 6 Thomas Gemini (1515-1562), astrolabe (1559), gilded brass, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (Inv. no. 42223). Image: © 2006 Museum of the History of Science, Oxford (details).
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