Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Palgrave Macmillan

Renaissance Responses to Technological Change

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

Authors:
  1. Sheila J. Nayar

    1. Greensboro College, Greensboro, NC, USA

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  • 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

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

Log in via an institution
eBook USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. From Petrarch to Bacon, Technécology Style: Introduction

    • Sheila J. Nayar
    Pages 1-16

  3. Part I

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-17
      Download chapter PDF

    2. From Print Error to Human Errancy in Print

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 19-60

    3. The Literary Erotics of Print and Misprint

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 61-110

  4. Part II

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 111-111
      Download chapter PDF

    2. The Golden Age of Chivalry in the Iron Age of Gunpowder

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 113-161

    3. Plebeian Presence in the Age of Gunpowder

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 163-214

  5. Part III

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 215-215
      Download chapter PDF

    2. Renegotiating the World by Compass and Card

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 217-265

    3. Space, Place, and Literary Self-Projection

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 267-307

    4. Technological Inter-Animation, Writ Large: Conclusion

      • Sheila J. Nayar
      Pages 309-319

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 321-366
    Download chapter PDF
Back to top

Keywords

About this book

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.

Reviews

“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)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Greensboro College, Greensboro, NC, USA

    Sheila J. Nayar

About the author

Sheila J. Nayar is Professor of English, Communication, and Media Studies at Greensboro College, USA. She is the author of three previous books, including Dante’s Sacred Poem, and has published widely on the intersections of narrative, technology, and phenomenology, including in JAAR, PMLA, and Studies in Philology.

Bibliographic Information

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Back to top

Search

Navigation