ENGINES OF THE IMAGINATION Renaissance culture and the rise of the machine
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loginHow did men and women in earlier ages respond to their technologies? In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Jonathan Sawday explores poetry, philosophy, art, and engineering to reveal the lost world of the machine in the pre- industrial culture of the European Renaissance.In the Renaissance, machines and mechanisms appealed to familiar fi g-ures such as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Montaigne, and Leonardo da Vinci, as well as to a host of lesser-known writers and artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This intellectual and aesthetic engagement with devices of all kinds would give rise to new attitudes towards gender as well as towards work and labour, and even fostered the beginnings of the new sciences of artifi cial life and reason which would be pursued by Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz in the later seventeenth century.
