Renaissance Machinery

Another interesting review in the TLS , of Jessica Wolfe’s Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge), an exploration of the literary uses of machinery and machine imagery in Renaissance literature. According to Wolfe, Renaissance writers saw “the profound applicability of mechanical practices and principles to extra-scientific questions.” In political theory, Simon Sturtevant compared servants to machines as “the living instruments upon whom rulers rely,” and even the Machiavellian conception of virtu refered not only to “human power or ingenuity” but to “the motive power of a machine.” Spenser’s Talus, from book 5 of the Fairie Queene, is a mechanical man that “reveals how uneasy he is about the uses of mechanics to foster war,” though the reviewer (Andrew Hadfield) adds, with a nod to Spenser’s own involvement in government, that “there is a huge difference between an expression of uneasiness and a criticism of the enthusiastic rigour with which the regime implemented its understanding of justice.”

In part, Wolfe builds on the work of Norbert Elias: Elias “saw the Renaissance as a period in which writers became increasingly concerned with the ways and means of self-regulation, the development of codes of practice that sought to internalize rules that would shape and control the individual. Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature does much to develop and qualify Elias’s insights, showing how machines simultaneously provided models of self-control, but also ‘warn against the perils of too much self-control.’ The principle of sprezzatura , developed in the early sixteenth century by Urbino, was designed to allow courtiers to escape the rigours of an excessively mechanistic approach to their lives. Instead of being dutiful and dull, hidebound by the rules they were forced to obey, they had to appear spontaneous, witty and brilliant, qualities that were learned, not inherited. In transforming themselves into such apparently effortless creatures, they had to become machines that ‘surpass nature.’ A similar effort lies behind Stoic philosophy and the attempt to escape from the vicissitudes of the world.”