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

The intellectual history of technology is a neglected field, and any contribution to it deserves to be greeted with enthusiasm. But it is easy to expect too much. Concerning the book under review, it should be understood what it is not. First, as the author himself warns us, it is “not a work of technological history,” but it “sets out to explore the imaginative history of machines and mechanisms within European culture between 1450 and 1700” (p. xv). Second, it focuses not in synchronic manner, as I had first expected, on the impact of technology in the thoughts and feelings of the people of a specific era and place, but in diachronic manner on the “imaginative history” of specific machines and mechanisms through the course of time. Third, it is not an account of scholarly research, based on a methodical strategy and rigorous logic, but an extended essay presented in a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness discourse. Jonathan Sawday, a professor of English who is widely read in general and well (but perhaps a little superficially) acquainted with the history of technology, seems to draw his material not from focused research but from his obviously broad knowledge and notes collected over the years.

The limits of the inquiry in time and space are laid down in the title as “Renaissance Culture” and in the book’s first sentence as “European culture between 1450 and 1700.” The objection that those two fields are not congruent (the Renaissance is usually assumed to have started a century earlier) turns out to be irrelevant because the stress on the diachronic development is liberating; it permits Sawday to stress developments he likes and to ignore others without explanation. In the earlier part of the story he reports on events in Italy, Germany, France, and Britain fairly evenly (the history of their technology being well researched and available in accessible languages); later the emphasis wanders to Britain, where the Industrial Revolution was just getting under way. The terminal date of 1700 is taken lightly. Included are not only the nineteenth-century inventor Charles Babbage but also Norman Rockwell’s World War II poster of “Rosie the Riveter” (modeled on a figure in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel) because the pneumatic hammer on Rosie’s lap shares a faint phallic symbolism with medieval depictions of distaffs in the hands of spinning women.

The eight chapters in which the text is structured have titles like “The Renaissance Machine and Its Discontents,” “Philosophy, Power, and Politics in Renaissance Technology,” and “The Turn of the Screw: Machines, Books, and Bodies,” to name the first three. They show no structural relationship with each other, and they present some duplication (e.g., the definition of “machine” is discussed in at least three chapters). There is a certain amount of useful discussion of the historical material; I found the treatment of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the most rewarding, and that of the seventeenth sketchy—extensive concerning England, scant for the rest of Europe. General conclusions are difficult to identify. Central to Sawday’s method is his use of historical material as a point of departure for discussions of our modern technological world and the associated political issues. This provides much opportunity for citing modern writers who have pronounced on those questions, and names like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Norbert Wiener, Lewis Mumford, Michel Foucault, and Marshall McLuhan abound. Such nonhistorical discussions predominate the book, and they will probably determine its audience. Historians of technology should not, however, ignore it. They will benefit from the rich material it displays and from struggling with the challenge of its methods.

In view of the wide-ranging nature of the book, a bibliography would have been helpful.