Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (review)

As so much of our history of technology is told from the viewpoint of producers or users, it is certainly worthwhile to look at these developments as they were seen by onlookers. Jessica Wolfe seeks to show how concepts derived from contemporary machinery were applied to the intricacies of human behavior, treating social and political interactions as if they could be manipulated as components in some great machine.

This is a fascinating piece of work, with notes that bear witness to an exhaustive reading in the secondary literature. But there is no bibliography of sources consulted, presumably on the grounds that it would simply duplicate the notes. If, as often happens, references are made several pages apart to a particular item, the reader needs to trawl through the many pages of notes to find the first reference (and one manuscript source is not referenced at all). Wolfe treats "tool," "instrument," and "engine" synonymously with "machine," and she generalizes from the English literature of the Elizabethan age to the "Renaissance" as an entity, blurring changes over two centuries. For a book like this, an author would be well-advised not to cram in too much and over-egg the pudding. In the opening chapters Wolfe tries to show how concepts originated in Italy, but mainly as sources for Elizabethans, and so she uses Italian authors in translation, preferably contemporary. Later chapters are devoted to three English writers of the time: the poet Edmund Spenser is the best known, another was a translator, the third a compulsive notetaker and margin-scribbler. Are they truly so typical that one can extrapolate from them to Renaissance attitudes in general?

Mathematical instruments are not machines, nor were they thought of as machines in those days. The ancient Greek mechane from which the Latin machina is derived seems to have referred to the artifacts and to certain facets of human behavior almost from the start, although in Latin the technological aspect may be primary. We still use words like "machination" in this alternative meaning. As Wolfe observes, naturalistic explanations were not then normally mechanistic. Still, people knew what a real machine was, and knew that machines were commonly employed in production—think of all the windmills and watermills, not just for grinding grain. All the same, attitudes to machines did change over the decades, inasmuch as mechanics came to be accepted as an applied mathematical art, which did not indicate that other so-called "mixed" sciences which combined mathematical treatment with material things had become mechanical.

Optics had long been understood as a mathematical mixed science, applied in the art of making mirrors and lenses. Yet that would not justify including such artifacts as "machinery," as Wolfe does. Were there telescopes and even microscopes in Elizabethan England? G. L'E.Turner has pointed out (in his article on William Bourne in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) that "there was neither the conceptual framework nor the technical capability to make such an instrument during this period" (i.e., the 1570s). Anyone who really thinks that Leonard Digges possessed an instrument that could read letters on a sheet of paper seven miles off should buy a telescope, readily available—but with better lenses than Digges could have had—and try the experiment! Although the "perspicillum" with which Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum says one can see insects wonderfully enlarged is commonly translated "microscope," it was more likely a simple hand-lens, not a compound microscope of the type with which Robert Hooke made such good use in his discoveries a generation later.

Wolfe often refers to automata and clocks as features of court life which provided metaphors for literary persons. Indeed, apart from watches (then very much a luxury item), in many places ordinary folk could admire the jack-work of public clocks, which even today seem to fascinate us. When she claims that "Renaissance machines are produced by and for the world of the imagination," she ignores all the machines that were actually built...