This chapter takes on the 350-year period following Gutenberg’s invention of the hand press in Mainz around 1450. It surveys the historical precedents for Gutenberg’s movable type in China and Korea; describes the development and the uneven spread of the hand press in Europe; and investigates the social and literary impacts and potentials of the technology, contending with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s claim that the printed book “brought about” historical events such as the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Questioning any neat separation of body and machine, McDowell argues for approaches that consider the human body as an essential literary technology. Hand-printed works, she contends, are the product neither of a human or a mere tool, but the two formed into a hybrid: “neither a printing press nor a hand can produce a printed text,” McDowell argues, “but together, machine and worker can and do.”

This chapter deals with literary appropriations of navigation technologies in Early Modern England. It focuses on two kinds of compasses: those that trace circles and those that point to magnetic north. Invented in around 200 BCE in China, the magnetic compass came into use in Europe in the early thirteenth century; by the sixteenth century, metaphorical employments of navigation technologies were widespread in English literature. Barrett reads the literary engagements of John Milton, John Donne, and others with both kinds of compasses to demonstrate how the devices served both to amaze and also to reorient the colonial geographic imagination of early modern readers. As she argues, “With the era of European exploration (and its associated colonial projects), the compass became virtually synonymous, for professional pilots and laypeople alike, with navigation – and wonder.”

This chapter investigates the role of optical technology in the literature of the late Early Modern period. It focuses primarily on literary engagement with the telescope, invented in the early seventeenth century in the Netherlands. In exploring representations of telescopes and optical technology in Early Modern literary, this chapter explores the duality by which, on the one hand, such technologies promised the godlike ability to make the unseen seen and the unknowable known; yet, on the other, allowed for the creation of seemingly miraculous mirages, illusions, and visual tricks. Herman argues that the lesson of works such as Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon is that we must remain skeptical of the notion that any technology can relieve us of the burden of sustained critical engagement. “The telescope does not automatically reveal the truth,” Herman concludes: “The image it presents must be interpreted.”

This introduction lays out the thesis of the book before defining the key terms "literature" and "natural theology" as they were understood in early modern England. It then briefly surveys the historiography of natural theology and relevant bodies of literary criticism and provides summaries of each chapter.

The Introduction briefly surveys the individual importance of memory studies and death studies in the lives, literature, and visual imagination of Renaissance England and then makes a case for the benefit and utility of mapping out their specific areas of intersection. Although the cross-pollination between memory and mortality is not strictly reciprocal, the two thematic fields during the period overlap in a range of philosophical, educational, theological, and ceremonial domains so that studying one field requires scholars to investigate and understand the other.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in autobiographical writing, drama, and poetry in Western Europe in the period 1500–1650.