Renaissance Futurities consists of eight essays and an editorial introduction designed to support and illustrate the proposition that, in the words of the editors, an interest in “futurity,” by which is meant an awareness of “fame and posterity,” “theorizations of the future,” and possible “prospective events,” were key components of Renaissance thinking in literature, in science, and in artistic theory and practice (3). To this end the editors have assembled a gallery of transdisciplinary expertise, embracing the fields of museology, literary studies, engineering, medicine, media studies, history, and art history, with the emphasis falling squarely on the latter discipline. So, this is a volume that looks back in order to try and capture its many and varied subjects in the act of looking forward, anticipating a future history that they would not, of course, live to see.

Inevitably, a project such as this is caught up in the problem of exporting a reading of the images, texts, and events of the European sixteenth century (which is where the majority of the essays are focused) in the light not of futurity, so much as the essayists’ predilection of mapping the present back into the past. At its best, this can result in some startling and unsettling revisions to the usual dynamic of intellectual history. Peter Matussek's chapter on the Renaissance memory theater and the ways in which that idealized device (of which no physical trace remains) may be thought of as anticipating the modern study of human computer interaction (HCI) and the work of contemporary media artists, shows this methodology at its best. The operation of the memory theater (which was both named as such and virtually resurrected in the work of Frances Yates in the mid-1960s) caught the attention not so much of scholars, many of whom were decidedly lukewarm about Yates's inventive descriptions of a hitherto-undiscovered country of hermeticism and the occult, but of artists, avant-garde composers, poets, and philosophers turned novelists, to say nothing of the MIT engineers in the 1970s who wrote of the “Simonides effect”: “the ancient principle of using spatial cueing as an aid to performance and memory” (57). Thus, a sixteenth-century system for organizing knowledge, revived in the mid-twentieth century, turns out to have been (in Matussek's phrase) a “backward-looking prophecy” of the digital age (64).

At their best, the essays in Renaissance Futurities achieve what Matussek does so well: present an early modern text or set of images as anticipating a raft of modern (or even postmodern) ideas or inventions. As such, some of these essays become provocative thought experiments, akin to counterfactual histories that turn out to be (in some measure) factual. Mari-Tere Álvarez's “Moon Shot,” subtitled “From Renaissance Imagination to Modern Reality,” explores the beginnings of “Early Modern space-colonizing science fiction” (12), as though a restless, devouring, European colonizing impulse at work in the New World could not be confined to mere terrestrial limits and had set its eyes even further afield. The moon—that object of devotion among Platonically inclined poets such as Sir Philip Sidney—became a fantasy land for John Donne's satire on the Jesuits establishing a moon-based branch of Roman Catholicism in 1611. Similarly, William Eamon's “Medicine as a Hunt” explores the emerging metaphor of the hunt as a means of understanding the quest for new information, plants, animals, minerals, and (distressingly, though Eamon has rather less to say about this) peoples, in a way that anticipated the modern framing of scientific research as a “hunt” for “cancer cures, chemical elements, and new cures for deadly diseases” (117).

Not every essay, however, quite manages to hit the bold mark proposed by the book's idea of futurity. On occasion, contributors become tied a little too closely to an idea of inevitable progress, rooted in some earlier model, which turns out to be only very distantly related, perhaps through chance, accident, or coincidence, to a Renaissance precursor. But Renaissance Futurities has a teasingly compelling quality in its quirky determination to think things through backwards. And in one respect, the future has already overtaken futurity: these essays (we're told) were assembled out of a summer colloquium held in a “picturesque, fifteenth-century chateau” (ix) in Missilac in northwestern France in 2017. In our new age of abandoned conferences, Zoom meetings, and Covid-19 travel restrictions, that bucolic setting for an academic gathering already looks like ancient history.