Machine in Renaissance Sciences

Abstract

This entry on Renaissance culture of the machine proposes a definition of the subject that accounts for both its continuity and variability from the late sixteenth century onward. In philosophical, scientific, and literary texts we see the term machine employed in ways that stretch its frame of reference to extend from individual organisms to the entire universe. Machines occupy a space that falls between artisanal knowledge and the outer reaches of mathematical physics, a liminal position that merges practice with theory. Similarly, the mechanical arts become contiguous with principles of an emergent mechanist philosophy in a relationship of mutual sustenance. René Descartes exemplifies the logic of interaction among branches of knowledge when he equates the laws of mechanics with nature itself and suggests that we regard bodies as machines crafted by the hand of God. Engineering, art, and philosophy all underwrite the burgeoning success of a type of book known as the theater of machines, beginning with the publication of Jacques Besson’s Theatrum instrumentorum et machinarum (1578) and Agostino Ramelli’s Le diverse et artificiose machine (1588). Machines (especially fountains, clocks, and automatons) become integral to the culture of the Renaissance because they supplied a blank slate on which various theories, mythologies, and commitments get inscribed. They appear across different forms of seventeenth-century writing, including verse, because they encode meanings that operate on multiple levels. Changes in the material and intellectual life of Europe brought about a steady ascent of the machine to the apex of power and visibility.