Renaissance Responses to Technological Change

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. From Petrarch to Bacon, Technécology Style: Introduction

   • Sheila J. Nayar

   Pages 1-16

3. Part I

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-17

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   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

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   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

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   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

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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.

• 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
• Elizabethan drama
• early modern cartography
• technological determinism
• Jacobean theater
• William Shakespeare

“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)

• Greensboro College, Greensboro, NC, USA

  Sheila J. Nayar

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.

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