Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art by E. R. Truitt (review)

While recent scholarship on automata has dealt primarily with the ancient and early modern periods, E. R. Truitt’s book bridges the chronological gap by discussing the perceptions, manufacture, and cultural implications of automata throughout the Middle Ages. According to the provided definition, medieval automata were ‘self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects, and they mimicked natural forms’ (p. 2). In her investigation of these ‘medieval robots’, Truitt treats three main themes: Western perceptions of foreign peoples and places; the liminal nature of automata; and the ways in which automata called into question ‘the natural/artificial binary’ (pp. 3, 9). The book is laid out chronologically, while each chapter focuses on one or more of these themes.

Truitt’s study commences with the ninth century, which marks the appearance of the first automaton in the West, and ends in the late Middle Ages, a time when automata populated the various spaces of Western society, from royal court, to public square and church. In the intervening years, automata rarely made a material appearance in the Latin West and were primarily associated with foreign places, cultures, and knowledge. As a result, much of this book examines the absence of automata and how this absence generated a certain aura of mystery and even fear around them and their creators. In order to understand the Western perception of these absent objects, Truitt draws on a range of textual sources, such as travel narratives, natural philosophical treatises, and fictional literature. She acknowledges the challenges of relying on such diverse genres; however, she demonstrates an aptitude for working with a variety of sources and succeeds in placing them in dialogue with one another. The final product is an insightful and thoroughly researched vision of Western notions of automata throughout the Middle Ages, and promises to provide for a more nuanced understanding of them in other historical periods as well.

Truitt commences her investigation of the first theme – Western notions of foreign lands – in Chapter 1, which links automata to medieval geographical concepts. Within the Western imagination, faraway places represented the storehouses of marvels. In the late Middle Ages, artificial marvels in particular were believed to operate through either mechanical means or demonic forces, placing them in contrast to miracle-working objects driven by divine, supernatural forces. Since automata were counted among the marvels found at the Mongol, Islamic, and Byzantine courts, they represented non-Christian, wondrous, and possibly even dangerous knowledge derived from the esoteric arts and sciences. In fact, various anxieties entrenched in Western society found their expression in literary descriptions of automata. For instance, Chapter 3 analyses legends that weave stories of morally corrupt natural philosophers who produced mechanical prophetic heads. These narratives speak to concerns that arose in the thirteenth century surrounding intellectuals who studied foreign philosophical texts and risked venturing outside ‘the proper limits of human knowledge’ (p. 83).

In the second and fourth chapters, automata are identified as liminal figures and border guards. I found this theme particularly compelling, and an even deeper theoretical engagement with the notions of liminality and border patrolling would surely enrich Truitt’s line of argument. Automata are poised between animation and inanimation, as well as artifice and nature, thus, Truitt rightly asserts to their tendency to straddle binary oppositions. For instance, in Chapter 4, preserved corpses are categorised as automata, in that they blur the dividing line between life and death by staving off decay through mechanical means. When serving as border guards, meanwhile, automata performed various functions, including monitoring physical thresholds and maintaining social boundaries by reinforcing courtly comportment or preventing the commingling of diverse social groups.

The last two chapters of the book examine the expanse of years between the late thirteenth century and the fifteenth century, when Western advances in mechanical engineering resulted in the multiplication of automata. Automata began to shed their foreign and occult...