Alex Keller

Literature and technology

The essays in this collection argue that literature from the middle ages to the present has been shaped -- thematically, formally, and materially -- by technology, and in the most practical sense technologies have also been transformed by their depiction in particular texts.

Ingenium: Five Machines that Changed the World (review)

777 it could measure only very large units of time, and yet the manuscripts are full of experiments designed for these purposes. For determining the depth of a lake, for example, Borrelli imagines the difficulty of the practitioner balancing his astrolabe while bobbing up and down in a small boat and trying to determine time lapses of a few minutes as the weighted plumb bob descends to the bottom and, shedding its load, rises again to the top. Other, more effective methods of marking time were available but were not considered so prestigious. Borrelli argues that the astrolabe was not so much a working tool as a model of the heavens. It may not have been very useful for actual timekeeping, but what it could demonstrate was how time itself was created by the marvelous revolutions of the celestial spheres. “Thanks to the astrolabe,” she writes, “as a structure to be understood and as a tool to be used, the human mind could grasp the ‘architectonica ratio,’ according to which the Divine Artifex had created the world” (pp. 25–26). The core of the book is a close analysis of an eleventh-century astrolabe manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (MS lat. 7412). General readers may want to pass over this section, but anyone who has struggled with the assembly of disparate materials which make up these documents will find the author’s descriptions and explanations most enlightening. Her more general remarks on methods of scientific knowledge transfer in the early Middle Ages will have still wider resonance for scholars in the field.

Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (review)

ferent types of terrestrial omens, some of them apparently derived from observation, others fanciful, perhaps relevant to the division between celestial observations and schematic grouping of phenomena unrelated to reality. This division between the factual and the schematic calls into question the motives for celestial observations, a question that Rochberg finds largely unanswerable. She investigates the degree to which fate was fixed by the result of divination, and how much it could be avoided by ritual action, and she deals briefly with ways in which the shape of the cosmos was envisaged. Rochberg addresses interesting issues. The problem is that she presents them so incoherently, scattering information on any one issue randomly between different chapters, sometimes repeated and occasionally inconsistent. One wonders what readership is intended. The synodic month is first mentioned without explanation and only much later is there a clear definition. “Normal Stars” are mentioned several pages before the reader is told what the expression means. Rochberg too often makes assertions without supporting evidence. Some sentences are convoluted and unclear. This is a book to be mined for information, but it is not recommended for the reader who wants a coherent presentation.