Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (review)

Optimism about the power of ingenuity to allow human beings eventually to overcome many limitations of the material world might seem to be a modern phenomenon. Renaissance humanists' hopes about human perfectibility, however, gave impetus to many European technological advances of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, important predecessors for European industrialization typically dated to a later period. In his provocative Engines of the Imagination, Jonathan Sawday offers brilliant insights into early modern attitudes toward technology. He uncovers and explores a paradox at the center of European understandings of the purpose of machines: human beings may develop technology to supplement their imperfect condition in an approximation of their Edenic perfection, but in doing so they may run the risk of sinfully transgressing the limitations imposed upon them as a consequence of original sin. The period thus encodes machines doubly, as signs of fallen humanity's weakness and as divinely merciful means of repairing the deficit. The book includes fascinating readings of Leonardo da Vinci, Agricola, Montaigne, and Francis Bacon, among a vast array of others, contributing an important intervention in the history of science. Unfortunately for the readers of this journal, only a small portion of the book treats matters of the Restoration, and these chapters are slightly less compelling than the rest of the study. But Sawday's bold approach to the questions he raises about European attitudes to the natural and the constructed environments and the technology that fuses the two offers an important foundation and fascinating background for thinking about engines of the Restoration imagination.

In five chapters on pre-Restoration topics, Sawday isolates key facets of Renaissance Europeans' fascination with machines, offering dazzling readings that focus on Montaigne's Essais, a painting of a woman at a spinning wheel (Las Hilanderas) by Velasquez, portions of Edmund Spenser, and scenes from William Shakespeare. Beginning with primarily Continental texts, Sawday explores da Vinci's, Montaigne's, and the Italian architect Domenico Fontana's fascination with machinery's ability to magnify power. He mentions in passing a theme that will recur at various points in his study: that for these men such engines acquire symbolic significance for the Renaissance state. He turns next to the importance of the print revolution for Renaissance mechanical thinking, focusing in particular on "machine books"—texts devoted to complex and typically unique engines such as those found in Agricola's illustrated De Re Metallica, one of scores of such tomes—arguing that such books contributed to the process by which "labor or work was itself being redefined by machinery" (88). In a chapter devoted to the gendered component of Renaissance technology, Sawday explores the imaginative connection of women and wheels, focusing particularly on the spinning wheel, but looking as well at Fortuna and her wheel. He then proceeds to a lively reading of Renaissance texts concerned with the oxymoronic possibility of mechanical life. He considers the many idiosyncratic Renaissance automata as part of the period's poetic investigations into the boundaries of art and nature. As mechanistic thinking took deeper root in the Renaissance imagination, he argues in his next chapter, Francis Bacon and others reoriented attitudes toward technology, moving from the enhancement of human perception to the treatment of bodies (and the universe) as merely complex machines whose operations—even the act of intercourse—submit to a dull regularity of process.

In the final pages of his chapter on "Reasoning Engines," Sawday explores a distrust of mechanistic thinking in John Wilmot's (Rochester's) verse. This final fifth of his study may be most pertinent to scholars of the Restoration. The final two chapters of Engines of the Imagination treat John Milton and Andrew Marvell and the place of machinery in their poetry. Contrasting Milton's Paradise Lost to the idealism of the Royal Society, Sawday argues that the poet reveals a skepticism about ingenuity, aligning invention and industry with the sinister figures of the epic and the consequences...