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College and Research Libraries
January 2002, Vol. 63, No. 1

Book Review

The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print. Ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. 212p. alk. paper, $85, cloth (ISBN 0415220637); $25.99, paper (ISBN 0415220645). LC 99-087623.

The essays of this collection are guaranteed to raise some hackles among book history purists. Is it acceptable, for example, to characterize an octavo edition of a seventeenth-century book—the Eikon Basilike of 1649—as a “neat palmtop,” while referring to larger quarto and folio versions as cumbersome “laptops” and “desktops?” How can Claire Preston describe the curiosity cabinet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a “visual search-engine” and Neil Rhodes call the humble almanac “the information superhighway (or cobbled lane, at any rate) of the later sixteenth century?” Anne Prescott begins an essay on early modern reference books by asking, dead seriously, “Is an encyclopedia a computer?” The last straw for a number of readers may just be Jonathan Sawday’s comparison of John Donne (1572–1631), the great Elizabethan poet, with William Gibson, the cyberpunk author of the 1984 cult novel Neuromancer. In essay after essay, we are confronted with never-before-heard comparisons, similes, metaphors, and analogies, imposing, it would seem, the nomenclature of our computer age onto aspects of early modern literature and book culture.

This book contains then, prima facie at least, more than enough evidence to convict the editors and contributors alike of the high historiographical crime of anachronism, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as “neglect or falsification, intentional or not, of chronological relation,” as “disregard of the different modes of life and thought that characterize different periods… in ignorance of the facts of history.”

But then take a closer look at the contributors’ biographies: There’s not a cyberpunk or a geeky anachronist among them. Timothy J. Reiss, for example, is a distinguished early modernist at New York University; Leah S. Marcus, a Renaissance scholar at Vanderbilt; and Stephen Orgel, professor of humanities at Stanford, is the editor of standard editions of works by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. The more numerous U.K. contributors are equally distinguished. Indeed, the volume bristles with scholarship, and no claim is made that is not anchored in lucid argument and copious references to the literature, both early modern and contemporary.

What’s more, if it is true that modern categories and fashionable computer vocabulary have been projected a bit too enthusiastically back into time, there is certainly more than enough movement in the other direction as well, for the authors of these essays are just as eager to show how Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians, poets, and dreamers anticipated many of our own modern knowledge technologies. The history of the computer began, after all, with Pascal’s adding machine of 1642, with Thomas Hobbes’s reflections on “computation” in 1656, and with Leibniz’s “calculus ratiocinator,” first demonstrated in January 1673. Far less known is the contribution of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets who imagined what we would someday know as the Internet and the World Wide Web, introducing for the purpose words such as matrix, Web, and net that we now regard as being so trendily our own. In a poem in 1611, for example (quoted by Sawday), John Donne describes how a network of mind has been “thrown upon the heavens” and, like the nets used by fishermen, now brings the universe to us—to our very desktop, as it were:

For of Meridians, and Parallels,
Man hath weav’d out a net, and this net throwne
Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne.
Loth to goe up the hill, or labour thus
To goe to heaven, we make heaven come to us.

Hyperlinks, image maps (such as the “zodiacal man”), use of icons as memory devices linking to larger meaning complexes, even interactivity (in the form of almanacs that performed astronomical calculations for the user and contained blank pages for the reader to add his own observation data)—all of these information-processing tools were anticipated, many also fully developed, in the printed works of early modern times. Today, when we use a combination of hardware and software to retrieve a subset of data from a larger set based on shared properties, does it really matter whether we call the device a “search engine” or, with Samuel Quiccheberg (1529–1567), a “promptuarium?” It becomes clear to the reader of these essays that the twentieth-century pioneers of computing, the Internet, and the Web all applied existing topoi, algorithms, and mnemonic devices to make their creations, confirming the truth of Victor Hugo’s dictum: Imaginer, ce n’est au fond que se ressouvenir. (“Imagining is in fact nothing other than remembering”). Or, as Thomas Browne put it in his Religio Medici of 1635, by Claire Preston, “intellectual acquisition… were but reminiscential evocation.”

There are numerous parallels between then and now. In his essay “The Early Modern Search Engine: Indices, Title Pages, Marginalia and Contents,” for example, Thomas Corns shows how “publishers and printers in the first century of print were already aware of the complex issues of varieties of user-interface” and succeeded in providing a host of user-friendly features that surely won them appreciative readers. His main case study is the Geneva Bible of the mid-1500s, financed and annotated by Calvinists to advance their version of the true faith. As Corns writes: “Each book has an abstract, as does each chapter. Each page has a header indicating content. The margins ooze glosses, interpretation, cross-references, and further pointers to context.” But this user-friendliness has its price, for despite the wealth of reader aids, “paradoxically, its apparatus, while facilitating access, closes down the openness of the text.” This shows, in Corns’s words, the “repressive potential” of hypertext and other user-friendly apparatuses that facilitate access on the one hand, but also “direct and control interpretation,” serving the ends of “premature closure.” The implications for creators and users of heavily linked Web sites today could not be more obvious and disturbing. (Several pages later, Sarah Annes Brown describes in “Arachne’s Web: Intertextual Mythography and the Renaissance Actaeon” the astonishing variety of Renaissance responses to Ovid’s story of Actaeon, showing just how “open” a text can be, how myriad the potential “links” are that actual readers make in their minds. By implication, Brown confirms Corns’s fears about the restrictive potential of hypertext, how constraining and limiting even the most richly linked electronic version must be).

The sense of incongruity that arises from the curious juxtapositions of language, concepts, and minds that is so jarring as we begin this book yields only gradually to appreciation and understanding. We first must learn to see how very different words from entirely different eras can, in fact, relate to the same referent—that whatever word we may use to name the rose changes not what the rose itself is. By the time we complete Neil Rhodes’s impressive final essay, “Articulate Networks: The Self, the Book and the World,” we realize that the difference that modern computers have effected in our world is really one of degree rather than of kind. This is an enormous and a humbling realization, a gift to the reader from a fine piece of humanities research.—Jeffrey Garrett, Northwestern University.