Sawday's Book Review

The place of women's bodies within the human-machine assemblage

, opening with a highly effective rereading of the WW2 icon 'Rosie the Riveter', who demonstrating Norman Rockwell's recycling of Renaissance iconography to produce 'Rosie as essentially a temporary man'. 'Where are we to discover the Renaissance equivalents of Rosie' asks Sawday. The answer lies, in part, in the figure of the distaff and the semiosis that attaches to spinning and weaving in Links Of London Bracelets the period, but also with the spinning wheel as a way of regulating women's labour and movement.

Chapter 5 marks a shift in Sawday's book, taking up the question of life and liveliness in art and technology, and the degree to which art might be said to out do or supersede nature. Offering sketches of Donne, Ascham, Puttenham, Herrick, Spenser, Wotton, and Jonson, Sawday establishes the parallels between discussions of mechanical and artistic efficacy in the period, concluding with an arresting portrayal of the traditions of the 'mechanical woman' as they populate English poetry of the period. Chapter 6 tells the story of the growing instrumental sense of mechanisms in the seventeenth century and the Baconian conception of 'nature' as an autonomous entity to be investigated by artificial means. Tracing Pepys' adventures with the microscope, Hooke's sense of 'nature as a form of hybridization between mechanisms and organic life', the prospect of a 'mechnically redesigned Adam', the advent of clockwork as a model of rationality, and the notion that human behavior might one day be Links Of London Charms revealed to be machinic, the chapter ends with a concise exploration of Descartes and Hobbes, and a rollicking reading of Rochester's mechanical or automatic libertinism as a 'hearkening back to an older pre-Baconian view of the relationship between human beings and their inventions'.

Enter Milton in Chapter 7 as chief antagonist to the Royal Society and its sense of mechanism but as he also whose poetry 'thrilled to the energy, power, and force which machines and engines seemed to unleash upon the world'. Reading Paradise Lost in dialogue with Cartesian machinic philosophy and the world of engines that was Restoration London, Sawday offers a sustained examination of Milton's Adam, finding in his creation story a hybrid argument about theology, industry, and the place of human agency in creation. In chapter 8 the 'machine stops' and the genre with which Sawday ends is pastoral figured as an Arcadian interruption of the machine's 'rise'. There's an admirable but ultimately unworkable impulse to closure in this chapter that nevertheless, quite fittingly, finds itself interrupted by the receding of 'mechanical' and 'human' today as our notion of the distinction or difference between 'life' and signs of 'liveliness' are called into question. This instability and the debates it yields, argues Sawday, might prove all too familiar to early moderns hence, I suppose, the importance of historicist reconstruction of the kind that Sawday offers us in Engines of Imagination.

Some readers will wish that the book had begun or ended with a more sustained engagement with the now well established field of science studies and its Renaissance incarnations; others will wish that there had been more discussion of questions of ecology where Sawday's arguments and choice of texts connect to questions of the natural world. That said, this is a fine book, written to appeal to 'the great variety of readers', as the phrase goes, or, at least to a greater variety than is sometimes usual. It will be highly useful to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, as well as academic staff. It is also a pleasure to read and a book to which I expect to return.

by: Ann

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