From Petrarch to Bacon, Technécology Style: Introduction

Nayar, Sheila J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_1

Sheila J. Nayar²

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Abstract

When Petrarch undertook his mission to cast off his putatively dark ages, his Renaissance world was radically different than that of Francis Bacon several centuries later. This was due, in no small measure, to the rise of three technologies (ones Bacon himself had emphasized for their import): the printing press, which engendered a revolution in communication; gunpowder, which did so in warfare; and the magnetic compass, which rewrote navigation and knowledge of the globe. This chapter lays out how these three technologies are methodologically handled in the book apropos their impact on literature, and on humanism more particularly, and, in doing so, underscores how literature, or culture, or technology, cannot so easily be disassociated or disentangled from other aspects of the environment.

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Notes

1.
Francesco Petrarch, Petrarch’s Africa, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 239.
2.
Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Volume 5 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994), 99.
3.
Quoted in David R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 106.
4.
In the European context, the magnetic compass was invented in 1269, and the cannon used for the first time in defense of Seville in 1247 (Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1963], 438). Guns appeared in 1338, when Petrarch was in his thirties—though, according to Polydore Vergil (1499), their first use was in the 1380 war between Venetians and Genoans (II. xi) (Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaver [Cambridge, MA: I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press, 2002], 261)—and, so, six years after Petrarch’s passing. Movable type appeared much later, between 1440 and 1460 (Mumford, Technics, 438–439).
5.
The word technology was not in conventional use when Bacon was writing admittedly (Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 6). Authors referred instead to the mechanical arts when discussing processes of manufacturing, and to crafted objects as inventions, engines, instruments, or devices (Adam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 13).
6.
Girolamo Cardano had marveled over these three almost a century earlier, in 1551 (Cohen, Technology, 12).
7.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 118.
8.
Ibid.
9.
Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery , trans. David Fausett (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994), 115–116.
10.
Ibid., 116.
11.
David R. Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 9. Such deference replicated the ancient Romans’ attitude toward the Greeks; additionally, the humanists’ patrons were typically those who ruled or were in high courtly positions (Ibid., 7–9).
12.
For more on Donne’s use of the term, see Chap. 6.
13.
Steve Matthewman, Technology and Social Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 127.
14.
Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 1.
15.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
16.
Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 130.
17.
John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 11–12.
18.
Ibid., 20.
19.
Ibid., 5.
20.
This I borrow from Ibid., 115.
21.
Bruce R. Smith inaugurated this critical movement (Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009], 121).
22.
Rosi Braidotti, quoted in Goody, Technology, 46.
23.
See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 13.
24.
See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
25.
Marco Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser (Rochester, NY: De Brewer, 2012), 7. Nievergelt is here channeling David Aers.
26.
Brian P. Copenhaver, introduction to Vergil, On Discovery, xii–xiii.
27.
Ibid., xxvi.
28.
Ibid.
29.
Richard Sugg, The Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 67.
30.
Bacon, New Organon, 89.
31.
Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island…. (Cambridge: Printed by the Printers to the Universitie of Cambridge, 1633), 10, Early English Books Online.
32.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 121.
33.
The phrase appears in Donne’s poem “An Anatomie of the World—The First Anniversary” (l. 255) (John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin [New York: The Modern Library, 2001], 192).
34.
Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 3.
35.
Peters, Marvelous, 34.
36.
Ibid., 38.
37.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 103.
38.
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimensions of Human Experience (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 21.
39.
Sugg, Smoke, 177.
40.
Matthew Bevis, Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 96.
41.
Berger, Redeeming, 159.
42.
See Ibid., 146.
43.
Thomas Browne , Religio Medici, in The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 103. As often happens, one’s own original analogizing turns out not to be so original. See Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Yale University Press, 1978), 234.
44.
Berger, Redeeming, 47.
45.
Ibid. Berger is here summarizing Helmuth Plessner’s position.
46.
Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools, ed. and trans. Edwin H. Zeydel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 58.
47.
Andy Wood, “‘Poore men woll speke one daye’: Plebeian Language of Defiance in England, c. 1520–1640,” in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, edited by Tim Harris (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 82.
48.
Stuart Clark quoted in Wood, “‘Poore,’” 82.
49.
Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 61.
50.
The latter, “negative” opinion is that of Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (New York: The American Library, 1969), 183. The former belongs to Michael Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
51.
Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 7.
52.
See Wolfe, Humanism, 241.
53.
Brian Rotman suggests that humans have “been shaped through a complicated co-evolutionary entanglement with language, technics, and communicational media” (quoted in Matthewman, Technology, 176).
54.
Peters, Marvelous, 226.

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Greensboro College, Greensboro, NC, USA
Sheila J. Nayar

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Nayar, S.J. (2019). From Petrarch to Bacon, Technécology Style: Introduction. In: Renaissance Responses to Technological Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96899-5_1
Published: 30 October 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96898-8
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