Renaissance Responses to Technological Change

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.

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

1. From Petrarch to Bacon, Technécology Style: Introduction.- I. The Comedy of Errata.- 2. From Print Error to Human Errancy in Print.- 3. The Literary Erotics of Print and Misprint.- II. Arms or the Man.- 4. The Golden Age of Chivalry in the Iron Age of Gunpowder.- 5. Plebeian Presence in the Age of Gunpowder.- III. Plus Ultra! Further Yet!.- 6. Renegotiating the World by Compass and Card.- 7. Space, Place, and Literary Self-Projection.- 8. Technological Inter-animation, Writ Large: Conclusion.