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1 Introduction: a New Instrument Notes 1 Introduction: A New Instrument 1. For more on the links between early modern technology and the rise of moder- nity see Philip Brey, “Theorizing Modernity and Technology,” in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003), 33–71; Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2007), 1–11. 2. Greenblatt himself claims that the “unmooring” of identity that took place during the first decades of the sixteenth century was rooted in “momentous changes in the material world” such as “a sharp population increase, the growth of cities, the first stages of an ‘agrarian revolution,’ the rapid expansion of certain key industries,” and “the realignment of European-wide economic forces.” Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 88. For more on these cultural changes see Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). My focus in this study is on Europe, but for the sake of comparison it is worth noting that non-European research also tends to emphasize broadly based cul- tural and sociological factors. Karl Wittfogel has proposed that the rise of individ- ualism took place primarily in “hydraulic societies” or “irrigation civilizations” such as China and Mesopotamia because they needed “[p]owerful, even despotic, systems of government and bureaucracy . to plan, implement, and maintain the large-scale irrigational works.” According to this theory, “the idea of the ‘individ- ual’, could only have taken place within the ‘technological polity’ of the hydrau- lic or irrigation society.” Peter F. Drucker, “The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons,” in Terry S. Reynolds and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, eds., Technology and the West: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 40–41; qtd. in Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 55. 3. While I use the terms tool and machine interchangeably in this study, Hegel noted that the machine, unlike the tool, is autonomous or automatic. Heidegger glosses Hegel’s distinction in Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 298. Karl Marx and Adam Smith distinguished the simple and rela- tively innocuous tool of the craftsman from the large and complex machine of the factory. In his Gundrisse of 1857–58 Marx writes that craftsmen animated their 216 Notes simple tools, while the development of complex machines after the industrial rev- olution made humans subordinate to machines. Karl Marx, Gundrisse, in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (1977, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 408–9; Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 72–75. 4. Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1976), x. 5. For more on the debasement of the mechanical arts see Elizabeth Pittenger, “Explicit Ink,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louis Fradenberg and Carla Freccero (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 223–42. 6. Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 7. For more on attitudes toward labor and the mechanical arts in the medieval and early modern periods see Elspeth Whitney, “Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 80 (1990): 1–169; George Ovitt, The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Jonathan Sawday has recently argued that the machine books of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies may have been intended to challenge the superiority of the liberal arts over the mechanical arts. While the mechanical arts did not permanently succeed in gaining pride of place, Sawday sees a partial victory for the mechanical arts in the seventeenth-century rise of the mechanical philosophy. Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 83–108, 210–16. 7. Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, x. 8. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J. M. Dent, 1973), 71. 9. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857–74), 4.271; qtd. in Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 109. 10. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers, eds., Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 11. Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15, 6. Her primary interest is in rhetorical theory, and there is ample evidence that rhetoric was viewed as an instrument or set of instruments. Gabriel Harvey wrote that the orator’s “principall Instrumentes ar[e] Rhetorique, for Elocutio[n], and Pronunciation; and Logique, for Invention, Disposition, and Memory.” Harvey’s ideal orator was an “Artificum Artificem,” a Craftsman of Craftsman. Qtd. in Lisa Jardine, “Gabriel Harvey: Exemplary Ramist and Pragmatic Humanist,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et théologiques 70 (1986): 36–48, quote on 43. 12. Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, xvii, xviii. 13. Henry Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vii. 14. Greenblatt, 1–2. 15. Ibid., 2; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 51. Notes 217 16. Greenblatt, 17. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Ibid., 139, 16. 19. Ibid., 195. Later he refers to Tamburlaine as “the appetitive machine” (196). 20. Hamlet (2.2.124), in William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997); Robert Boyle, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulnesse of Experimental Naturall Philosophy (1663), 27–28; Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York and London: Norton, 2003), 51; Sawday, Engines of the Imagination; Adam Max Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (Basingstoke, England and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 21. For more on Donne, Spenser, and Drayton, see Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 168–70. 22. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5. For a useful critique of object studies see James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence’s argument in “Between Thing and Theory” Poetics Today 24.4 (Winter 2003), 641–71. 23. De Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, eds., 1–2, 8. Object studies like this one are indebted to cultural materialism, the Marxist approach to literary and cultural studies founded by Raymond Williams and others in the late 1970s. Curtis Perry has defined cultural materialism as “an approach to cultural analysis that remains alive to the materiality of all kinds of artifacts, explores the socio-economic condi- tions within which they are produced, and examines their participation in other ideological and material fields of culture.” Curtis Perry, ed. Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), xi; For Williams’s own definition see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5. 24. Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (New York: Norton, 2000), 119; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 135; Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, passim. 25. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. Cusanus described the mind as a balance or a lens that could discover the secrets of God’s glory. See Charles Trinkhaus, “Protagoras in the Renaissance: An Exploration,” in Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Edward P. Mahoney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 201–2; Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 21. 26. See for example Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 119; Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 70. 27. Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4. 28. Edward G. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5. 29. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 293. 30. Heidegger argues that modern technology is also a revealing, but that “The reveal- ing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern],
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