E. R. Truitt. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art.

Extract

Robots and other automata—self-moving manufactured objects that appear to be alive—have a long history in the Western cultural imagination as repositories of cultural anxieties about the power and limits of human art and what indeed it means to be human. In Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art, the most comprehensive and in-depth study of automata in the European Middle Ages to date, E. R. Truitt skillfully interweaves material from literary, historical, and philosophical texts, manuscript illuminations, and archival documents to produce a multifaceted picture of how medieval people imagined, viewed, and deployed automata that challenged their own binary concepts of life and death, the natural and the artificial, the foreign and the familiar, and the real and the fake. In doing so, she illuminates a neglected aspect of late medieval courtly and philosophical culture and makes a persuasive case for the importance of the study of medieval automata as an aspect of our understanding of medieval and, more broadly, Western attitudes toward technology and the machine.