The Renaissance Computer Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print

In the fifteenth century the printing press was the 'new technology'. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge. As early as 1500 there were already 20 million books in circulation in Europe. How did this rapid explosion of ideas impact upon the evolution of new disciplines?
"The Renaissance Computer" looks at the fascinating development of new methods of information storage and retrieval which took place at the very beginning of print culture. It also asks some crucial questions about the intellectual conditions of our own digital age. A dazzling array of leading experts in Renaissance culture explore topics of urgent significance today, including the contribution of knowledge technologies to state formulation and national identity; the effect ofmultimedia, orality and memory on education; the importance of the visual display of information and how search engines reflect and direct ways of thinking.

Introduction 1. The Silence of the Archive and the Noise of Cyberspace 2. Towards the Renaissance Computer 3. Ramus, Pedagogy and Technology 4. Textual Icons: Reading Early Modern Illustrations 5. The Early Modern Search Engine: Indices, Titlepages, Marginalia and Contents 6. National and International Knowledge: the Limits of the Histories of Nations 7. Arachne's Web: Intertextual Mythography and the Renaissance Actaeon 8. The Daughters of Memory: Thomas Heywood's Gunaikeion and the Female Computer 9. Pierre de La Primaudaye's French Academy: Growing Encyclopedic 10. Structure in the Wilderness Forms: Ideas and Things in Thomas Browne's Cabinets of Curiosity 11. Articulate Networks: the Self, the Book and the World

Neil Rhodes is Reader in English Literature at the university of St Andrews. His previous publications include The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (1992), John Donne: Selected Prose (1987), and Elizabethan Grotesque (1980). Jonathan Sawday is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Strathclyde University. He is author of The Body Emblazoned (1995), and co-editor of Literature and the English Civil War.