Engines of the Imagination

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).

"This is a magisterial work of myth-busting, and a marvellous demonstration of how art and literature may be used to reanimate the material imagination of an historical period. The old idea of the Renaissance as a pretechnological pause, or paradise, is gone for good." - Steven Connor, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK"Jonathan Sawday has written another big, beautiful, brilliant book that will change the way we all see (and hear) the Renaissance." - Gary Taylor, Florida State University, USA"This is a brilliant achievement… It has huge intellectual and imaginative range and is written with great vitality… This could be the book of the decade in Renaissance Studies."- Neil Rhodes, University of St Andrews, UK"Jonathan Sawday’s pioneering and thoughtful work can change the course of the study of the Early Modern period… This illuminating book enlarges our sense of the Renaissance, redirects our focus, and shows us a world elsewhere we have not seen before." - Arthur Kinney, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA‘Engines of the Imagination offers a fascinating picture of Renaissance encounters with technology. Engaging and entertaining, Sawday's book will become required reading for all students of the period’. - Mary Poovey, New York University, USA"While few books can truly lay claim to the achievement of crossing disciplinary boundaries, Sawday’s impressive Engines of the Imagination must certainly be numbered as one of them." - The British Society for Literature and Science'Jonathan Sawday’s immensely enjoyable and learned Engines of the Imagination is...a careful examination of the literal and figurative function of all manner of ‘engines’ prior to their coding as ‘automatic’, necessarily ‘inorganic’,‘inhuman’machines.' - Julian Yates, The Review of English Studies"Sawday’s book is consistently engaging, insightful, and suggestive" - Stephen B. Dobranski, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900'...immensely enjoyable and learned... this is a fine book, written to appeal to 'the great variety of readers', as the phrase goes, or, at least to a greater variety than is sometimes usual. It will be highly useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, as well as academic staff. It is also a pleasure to read and a book to which I expect to return.' - Julian Yates, Review of English Studies

• Contents Contents i Epigraphs ii List of Plates iv Preface and Acknowledgments viiThe Machine in the Margins 1Philosophy, Power and Politics in Renaissance Technology 36The Turn of the Screw: Machines, Books, and Bodies 91Women 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 293Seventeenth Century Chapter Seven: Milton and the Engine 372The Machine Stops 427Notes Index