Abstract
What impact do technologies have on us? Do the often powerful and sometimes mysterious tools, instruments, and machines that we use on a regular basis reinforce existing personality traits, or do they create us anew? These questions are important in any historical period, but they seem particularly apt in relation to the era that has been known since the mid-nineteenth century as the Renaissance because the two major paradigms related to the period highlight the development of individualism on one hand and technological shifts on the other.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 1976), x.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J. M. Dent, 1973), 71.
Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers, eds., Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
Henry Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vii.
Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4.
Edward G. Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934; New York: HBJ, 1962), 14–15;
Klaus Maurice and Otto Mayr, eds., The Clockwork Universe: German Clocks and Automata 1550–1650 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1980), vii–ix.
Robert Hooke, Micrographia:or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon (1665), sig.a2v.
Isaac Vossius, De lucis natura et proprietate (Amsterdam, 1662), 102; qtd. in Ruestow, 37.
Angelo Poliziano, “Angeli Politiano praelectio: cui titulis Panepistomon,” in Omnia Opera Angeli Politiani (Venice, 1498), Z2v; qtd. in Wolfe, 38.
Solly Zuckerman, Beyond the Ivory Tower (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 129.
Ron Westrum, Technology and Society: The Shaping of People and Things (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991), 5.
Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 17.
David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 12.
Copyright information
© 2009 Adam Max Cohen
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cohen, A.M. (2009). Introduction: A New Instrument. In: Technology and the Early Modern Self. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619586_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619586_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37637-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61958-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)