Technik in der frühen Neuzeit: Schrittmacher der europäischen Moderne (review)

The editors explain at the beginning that the title should have a question mark. At issue is not the role of technology in the formation of modern Europe, but the technological determinism implicit in the term pacesetter. Over the couple of centuries during which Europe assumed the form we call "modern," the use of machinery proliferated, especially in the manufacturing sector, and invention and innovation came to be prized, protected, and encouraged. Europeans were not so much responding to technology as creating a new place for it in their culture; indeed, creating "technology" as a category of thought.

The authors approach this development from several different directions. Looking to its literary expression, Petra Schaper-Rinkel surveys the interplay of technology, knowledge, and power in the utopias of Campanella, More, and Bacon, and Martin Disselkamp describes how Lipsius used Roman military engineering as emblematic of the political virtues of the empire. Contesting the now-common wisdom that sees in early automata the origins of the modern cyborg, Nicole C. Karafyllis argues that the latter emerged only with Descartes's reconceptualization of automata from imitations or simulations of life understood in Aristotle's sense to models of life itself, now reduced in essence to motion driven by mechanical force.

Turning to the practitioners, Matteo Burioni examines the decision taken shortly after the foundation of the Accademia del Disegno to subordinate architecture to painting and sculpture and thus to exclude those whose claim to be architects rested on their practice as engineers. Redrawing the boundaries between art and craft, he suggests, the move opened space for the new mode of natural philosophy proposed by Galileo. Also focusing on Florence, Daniela Lamberini analyzes the politics of the Medicean system of privileges and patents, noting the particular emphasis on industrial machinery and on hydraulic projects aimed at containing the Arno.

Marcus Popplow looks to the new literature of machines in the sixteenth century for the source of the notion of machinery as a general phenomenon over and above individual machines. Seeking enhanced social status, the engineer-authors appropriated the common criteria for award of a patent — that the device be "new, useful, and ingenious" — and made them characteristics of engineering practice as a whole, thereby creating the semantic grounds for a discourse about technology that had not been possible earlier and opening early modern technology to discourse analysis.

One form of that discourse has come to be called "technology assessment," and Christian Mathieu explores its beginnings in Venice, where new inventions were put to the test. They had to work as advertised. In the area of drainage and dredging, more than efficacy was involved. The very existence of the city depended on keeping the water flowing in established channels. For perhaps the first time on record, authorities extended testing to consider possible outcomes. What effects might a proposed means of excavation have over the long term? The technique might work, but it might have undesirable consequences, and it was becoming the job of the state to make that determination.

Yet, as Romano Nanni notes in "Machinae ad maiestate [sic] imperii e machine della manufattura tessile," until the late seventeenth century the machine literature took almost no note of the class of machines that were radically restructuring the manufacture of textiles. He sees in this the dead hand of Vitruvius, who as classical model kept attention focused on the stoneyard; but it may also reflect the resistance of the guilds, not so much to replacement of their manual skills as to public knowledge of their processes, mechanized or not.

That is where the modern state came in. In the transition from Ancien Regime, technology became a matter of policy. As Torsten Meyer shows, by 1777 Johann Beckmann was arguing that it was the job of government to understand and foster the body of techniques by which the products...