Instrumentality

""A fascinating exploration of the ornate interfaces—measuring devices, geometric diagrams, the arts and sciences—between humans and their objects. Instrumentality is an important contribution to medieval studies of the mechanical arts and expands modern ideas about our techniques for understanding the world."" —Matthew Boyd Goldie, author of Scribes of Space: Place in Middle English Literature and Late Medieval Science   ""Exploring a series of ‘eloquent devices’ that enabled both scientific investigation and literary imagination, J. Allan Mitchell’s Instrumentality carefully argues for the importance of instruments as tools for and makers of our thinking. Attending to the specific material processes of the various instruments taken up in the book, which range from the astrolabe to the chord diagram, Mitchell frames medieval instruments as information processing mechanisms that interface with bodies to construct and define our understandings of the world. Instrumentality is an adventurous book that challenges us to reflexively consider the significance of instruments to academic knowledge production while also stressing the need for a ‘critical instrumentality’ that can help us select the tools most suited for enacting positive social change."" —David Parisi, author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing