Engines of the imagination: Renaissance culture and the rise of the machine

Abstract

The Renaissance machine and its discontents -- The world of Techne -- A word run upon wheels: the sound of Renaissance -- Windmills and Watermills -- Shame -- Philosophy, power, and politics in Renaissance technology -- The vital humour of the terrestrial machine -- A water-driven world -- Watching machines with Montaigne -- Movement and the philosophy of machines -- Machines and social power -- The Renaissance megamachine: Rome 1585-6 -- The turn of the screw: machines, books, and bodies -- Of alientation and pins -- What is't o'clock?: clock time and social status -- Print and mechanical culture -- The birth of the Renaissance machine -- Gregorius Agricola and the invention of mechanical labour -- The syntax of the machine -- the mechanical world of Agostino Ramelli -- The body of the machine -- Texual engines -- Perpetual motions -- Women and wheels: gender and the machine in the Renaissance -- Rosie the Riveter -- The Spinners -- Wheels -- Rotary punishment -- The wheel of Fortune -- A thing made for Alexander -- Nature wrought: artifice, illusion, and magical mechanics -- Metallic fantasies -- Fabricating nature -- Mechanical illusions -- Bodies without souls -- Mechanical Women -- Reasoning Engines: the instrumental imagination in the seventeenth century -- Buying an instrument -- Francis Bacon and the reform of mechanism -- Seeing with machines -- Robert Hooke's artificial bodies -- The second Adam -- Clockwork reason -- The caclulating machine -- Mechanical theology -- Political machines -- Sex machines -- The semi-omnipotent engine -- The idea of the engine -- Milton and industry -- Milton and the machine -- The machine stops -- The interrupted idyll of Andrew Marvell -- The happy return -- Conclusion: the machine stops