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Error, Misuse, Failure Object Lessons from the English Renaissance
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Error, Misuse, Failure Object Lessons from the English Renaissance Hardcover - 2002 - 1st Edition

by Julian Yates


From the publisher

If certain objects work well, no one notices them. As with "black boxes, " their success may be gauged by their relative invisibility -- and this was the indirect goal of the objects that Julian Yates considers here: the portrait miniature, the relic, the privy (flush toilet), the printed text, and the priest-hole (a secret hiding place for Catholic priests in Protestant England).

Because each of these contrivances was prone to error, misuse, and sometimes catastrophic failure, they become in Yates's analysis an occasion for recasting the history of the English Renaissance as object lessons -- "knowing from the point of view of the known." It is through such lapses -- the texts and stories generated to explain away a relic that is too easily faked, a miniature that is too curiously real, the stench of a failing privy, a book that persistently sheds its pages, or the presence of so much "papist trash" in an ostensibly reformed England -- that Yates recovers the silent work of "things" in cultural production.

Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices, Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom. Yates offers a mode of historical inquiry rooted in material culture, sensitive to the way humans induct nonhumans (animals, plants, and manufactured things) into their communities. Historically, the book offers a new set of stories about the rise of printing, the development of domestic architecture, and England's Catholic community -- stories that remind readers of the ways in whichattending to the history of nonhumans requires a radical rethinking of historical landmarks and boundaries.

Details

  • Title Error, Misuse, Failure Object Lessons from the English Renaissance
  • Author Julian Yates
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 250
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
  • Date December 2002
  • ISBN 9780816639618
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Error Misuse Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance

Error Misuse Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance

by Yates, Julian

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First Edition
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Hardcover
ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9780816639618 / 0816639612
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Description:
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. "Drawing object lessons from failing technological devices, Error, Misuse, Failure plumbs the foundations of Renaissance culture in England, recovering a curious language of mistakes, dirt, and parasitism that associates the failures of these "things" with the figures of Rome, Catholicism, and Sodom." Grey hardcover, maroon titling. Light wear, corners bumped, ISBN sticker on rear cover; no jacket, likely as issued. Text clean; xx, 250 pages; index, notes, b/w figures.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. Octavo.
Item Price
NZ$85.11
FREE shipping to USA