Renaissance Responses to Technological Change

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This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century—the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass—placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between humanist drives and print culture; places the rise of gunpowder warfare beside the equivalent rise in chivalric romance; and illustrates fraught attempts by humanists to hold on to classicist traditions in the face of seismic changes in navigation. Lively and engaging, this study illuminates not only how literature responded to radical technological changes, but also how literature was sometimes forced, through unanticipated destabilizations, to reimagine itself. By tracing the early modern human’s inter-animation with print, powder, and compass, Nayar exposes how these technologies assisted in producing new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.
This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century—the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass—placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between humanist drives and print culture; places the rise of gunpowder warfare beside the equivalent rise in chivalric romance; and illustrates fraught attempts by humanists to hold on to classicist traditions in the face of seismic changes in navigation. Lively and engaging, this study illuminates not only how literature responded to radical technological changes, but also how literature was sometimes forced, through unanticipated destabilizations, to reimagine itself. By tracing the early modern human’s inter-animation with print, powder, and compass, Nayar exposes how these technologies assisted in producing new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.
Places print culture in the context of emerging technologies in the long sixteenth century Covers a wide range of Renaissance texts, including military treatises, broadside ballads, stage plays, satires, works of natural philosophy, and maps Appeals to scholars and students of Renaissance literary studies, print culture, the history of technology, and media ecology

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Sheila J. Nayar

Themen in »Renaissance Responses to Technological Change«

the printing press History of Gunpowder Early Modern Technology The Magnetic Compass Renaissance literary culture Renaissance print culture gunpowder warfare Shakespeare John Donne Petrarch's humanism Technology and Romance technology and culture media ecology Don Quixote François Rabelais

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“Everyone knows something about Francis Bacon’s famous printing press, gunpowder, and magnetic compass.  Here Sheila J. Nayar takes you inside the highways and byways of Renaissance humanism to discern their varied and even contradictory impact on culture.  One of the finest and most sophisticated studies of literature and technology in the past two decades.” (Thomas J. Misa, Professor of the History of Technology, University of Minnesota, USA, and author of Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present)
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