Awarded a 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Prize Honourable Mention. This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networks by fictional and non-fictional scientists of the early modern period. Beginning with an investigation of the roots of artificial servants, humanoids, and automata from earlier times, LaGrandeur traces how these literary representations coincide with a surging interest in automata and experimentation, and how they blend with the magical science that preceded the empirical era. In the instances that this book considers, the idea of the artificial factotum is connected with an emotional paradox: the joy of self-enhancement is counterpoised with the anxiety of self-displacement that comes with distribution of agency.In this way, the older accounts of creating artificial slaves are accounts of modernity in the making—a modernity characterized by the project of extending the self and its powers, in which the vision of the extended self is fundamentally inseparable from the vision of an attenuated self. This book discusses the idea that fictional, artificial servants embody at once the ambitions of the scientific wizards who make them and society’s perception of the dangers of those ambitions, and represent the cultural fears triggered by independent, experimental thinkers—the type of thinkers from whom our modern cyberneticists descend.

This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networks by fictional and non-fictional scientists of the early modern period. Beginning with an investigation of the roots of artificial servants, humanoids, and automata from earlier times, LaGrandeur traces how these literary representations coincide with a surging interest in automata and experimentation, and how they blend with the magical science that proceeded the empirical era. These representations eerily prefigure modern robots, androids, and artificially intelligent networks, and the art that is responsible for their creation blurs the edges between magic and science in a way that resonates especially with modern notions of cybernetics. In the instances that this book considers, the idea of the artificial factotum is connected with an emotional paradox: the joy of self-enhancement is counterpoised with the anxiety of self-displacement that comes with distribution of agency. In this way, the older accounts of creating artificial slaves are accounts of modernity in the making--a modernity characterized by the project of extending the self and its powers, in which the vision of the extended self is fundamentally inseparable from the vision of an attenuated self. This book discusses the idea that fictional, artificial servants embody at once the ambitions of the scientific wizards who make them and society's perception of the dangers of those ambitions, and represent the cultural fears triggered by independent, experimental thinkers--the type of thinkers from whom our modern cyberneticists descend.

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended ‘irrationality’ entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others’ perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools’ characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

This book explores a neglected feature of intellectual history and literature in the early modern period: the ways in which the body was theorized and represented as an intelligent cognitive agent, with desires, appetites, and understandings independent of the mind. It considers the works of early modern physicians, thinkers, and literary writers who explored the phenomenon of the independent and intelligent body. Charalampous rethinks the origin of dualism that is commonly associated with Descartes, uncovering hitherto unknown lines of reception regarding a form of dualism that understands the body as capable of performing complicated forms of cognition independently of the mind. The study examines the consequences of this way of thinking about the body for contemporary philosophy, theology, and medicine, opening up new vistas of thought against which to reassess perceptions of what literature can be thought and felt to do. Sifting and assessing this evidence sheds new light on a range of historical and literary issues relating to the treatment, perception, and representation of the human body. This book examines the notion of the thinking body across a wide range of genres, topics, and authors, including Montaigne’s Essays, Spenser’s allegorical poetry, Donne’s metaphysical poetry, tragic dramaturgy, Shakespeare, and Milton’s epic poetry and shorter poems. It will be essential for those studying early modern literature, cognition, and the body.

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J.D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation—a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550–1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period’s original shorthand manual—Characterie (1588)—but also of the first book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright’s account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination—less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright’s proscriptions. These are followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative—and prophylactic. Bright’s technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information—as theory, and technology.

This book provides students and other interested readers with a comprehensive survey of science fiction history and numerous essays addressing major science fiction topics, authors, works, and subgenres written by a distinguished scholar. This encyclopedia deals with written science fiction in all of its forms, not only novels and short stories but also mediums often ignored in other reference books, such as plays, poems, comic books, and graphic novels. Some science fiction films, television programs, and video games are also mentioned, particularly when they are relevant to written texts. Its focus is on science fiction in the English language, though due attention is given to international authors whose works have been frequently translated into English. Since science fiction became a recognized genre and greatly expanded in the 20th century, works published in the 20th and 21st centuries are most frequently discussed, though important earlier works are not neglected. The texts are designed to be helpful to numerous readers, ranging from students first encountering science fiction to experienced scholars in the field.

This volume examines early modern representations of women’s reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women’s stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women’s history, and the history of medicine.