The 17th century is dominated by the machine. It rules as a technical construction over the theories and practices of the scientific revolution and is crucially responsible for the rise of empirical sciences. As a metaphor, it holds explanatory power for baroque models of the world and humanity, of body and spirit; it visually represents cultural and natural, secular and religious processes. Literature and theater cannot be conceived without machines. This is the focus of this book: the multifunctional figure of the machine in relation to theater and literary aesthetic discourses and performances. For machines in the rationalistic-mechanistic Baroque era not only have philosophical explanatory value - they also possess generative potential: the potential to create the new and the different, the possible and the impossible. The poiesis of the machine in the baroque period.