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In their introduction to Posthumanist Shakespeares Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus discuss how posthumanism explores "the implications of bio-, nano-, cogno-, and info-technologies on body, mind, culture, and epistomology." They investigate "what it means to be human" in an era "of dramatic technological change" (p. 6). In my books Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (2006) and Technology and the Early Modern Self (2009) I explore how Shakespeare's own era of "dramatic technological change" similarly redefines "what it means to be human". As historians of technology including Lynn White, Jr. (1978) and George Basalla (1988) have shown, in late medieval and early modern Europe mechanical inventions and technological revolutions spurred theoretical and philosophical breakthroughs. In fact the technological revolutions in the realms of print, navigation, optics, surveying and other fields in the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries may have helped lay the groundwork for the rise of science in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. New technologies such as the printing press, the telescope and the microscope jarringly brought far things close and revealed them to be wildly different than we had assumed, much more like us or more different than we had dreamed, dislodging previous understandings of interior and exterior, safe and unsafe, good and evil.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137033598_13

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