Renaissance Responses to Technological Change (eBook)

Sheila J. Nayar is Professor of English, Communication, and Media Studies at Greensboro College, USA. She is the author of three previous books, including Dante’s Sacred Poem, and has published widely on the intersections of narrative, technology, and phenomenology, including in JAAR, PMLA, and Studies in Philology.

Acknowledgments 6
Contents 8
List of Images 10
Chapter 1: From Petrarch to Bacon, Technécology Style: Introduction 13
Undoing the “Dark Ages” 13
Technécology as Methodological Approach 15
Anxiety, Error, Distortions, Laughter—Not Necessarily in That Order 18
The Chapters That Follow 22
Part I: The Comedy of Errata 29
Chapter 2: From Print Error to Human Errancy in Print 30
Positioning Humanists in the Age of Print 30
Errata in Early Modern Print Culture 32
The Errant Author 42
Print Error as Truth 46
The Loose and Wandering, the Cheap and Unbound 53
Error and the Technological Gendering of Print 57
Chapter 3: The Literary Erotics of Print and Misprint 72
Bookmen and Their Errantry 72
Rabelaisian Lists and Largesse 76
Typographicopia 76
Incontinence, Incompleteness, Instability 84
The Man of La Máquina 90
Anticipated Error: Part I of Don Quixote 91
Unintended Error, Both Anticipated and Not: Part II of Don Quixote 98
Part II: Arms or the Man 122
Chapter 4: The Golden Age of Chivalry in the Iron Age of Gunpowder 123
Iron and the Golden Age 123
The Early Modern Iron Age 129
Humanism and the Early Modern Iron Age 134
Golden-Age Warriors or Carpet Knights? 140
Golden-Age Romances, Iron-Age Style 148
A Lesson in “Fantasied Men of Warre” 157
Chapter 5: Plebeian Presence in the Age of Gunpowder 172
This Soldier’s Life 172
Class Contagion and the Chivalric Epic 175
Plotting Anew with Powder 178
Stage Plays, Artillery Style81 185
Pow(d)er, Pyrotechnics, and Dirtying Up the Early Modern English Stage 199
Dirtying Up Humanism in Light of Powder Politics 207
Part III: Plus Ultra! Further Yet! 224
Chapter 6: Renegotiating the World by Compass and Card 225
Compass Culture and the Extended Self 225
The Material-Metaphysical Pull of the Magnetic Compass 230
The Evolution of Map-Mindedness 238
From T-O to Ptolemy, Age to Experience 241
The Anxiety-Exhilaration of Terra Incognita 248
The Ancient-Modern Antipodes 254
The Cartographical Rise of the Humanist Past 258
Chapter 7: Space, Place, and Literary Self-Projection 274
The Changing Visual Field 274
The Rise of Sedentary Travel 276
The Body as a Map 280
Mapping the Stage, and Staging the Map 286
Mapping the Land, Course by Course, Couplet by Couplet 291
Above and Beyond the Orbis Terrarum 299
Chapter 8: Technological Inter-Animation, Writ Large: Conclusion 315
A Ptolemaic Perspective on Technology 315
Locating a Middle Ground 318
Complicating the Technécological 320
Bibliography 326
Index 353