Subtle devices: Machinery and the limits of humanism, 1580--1625

This dissertation argues that machinery occupies a central yet unstable position in Renaissance debates concerning the legitimacy of artifice. Mechanical devices intervene in some of the most pressing concerns of Renaissance humanism, supporting or undermining the legitimacy of its political and philosophical doctrines including the arcana imperii, Stoic imperturbability, courtly sprezzatura, and Skeptical relativism. Humanism and its machinery are engaged in a series of ongoing struggles, for as strenuously as Renaissance writers attempt to accommodate machinery to their habits of thought, machinery resists that accommodation, alternately exalting and annuling humanism's most cherished and precarious beliefs.; Chapter 1 begins in sixteenth-century Urbino, where the revival of Archimedean mechanics, predicated upon the effacement of effort, supports the ideals and methodologies of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. Qualities such as grace and sprezzatura, privileged by Castiglione, derive their cultural authority from the motive power of machinery. Chapter 2 examines how English Renaissance writers respond to the interpenetrating discourses of mechanics and courtesy literature inherited from Italy with varying degrees of enthusiasm or trepidation. Chapter 3 focuses upon Gabriel Harvey, whose avid reading of technical treatises informs and often frustrates his courtly aspirations. Mechanical devices also shape Harvey's interpretive strategies as a reader, inflecting his understanding of the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge and informing his interpretation of Chaucer. Chapter 4 argues that mechanical devices shape the critical strategies of George Chapman, who turns to globes and telescopes in order to define his "deep-searching" reader. Chapman's pursuit of textual inscrutability is examined in light of Renaissance technologies that rival the compact textual space cultivated by Chapman. Chapter 5 argues that the mediatory function of machinery exposes the inherently flawed processes of political and verbal mediation practiced by sixteenth-century culture. Serving as "inanimate ambassadors," devices including telescopes and speaking heads mimic the rhetorical techniques of obliquity used by human ambassadors, and they arouse acute anxieties concerning the transmission of secret information. The final chapter argues that, in Spenser's Faerie Queene, the metal-man Talus embodies and challenges commonplace Stoic fantasies of imperturbability, his iron body and his rage externalizing Spenser's apprehensions about the "stonie Philosophie."...