The Rise of Machines in Reformation NurembergJakob Ayrer's "Fastnachtspiel of Fritz Dölla with His Bewitched Fiddle"

This paper analyses the carnival play about a farm servant who was given a magic fiddle that forced everybody who heard it to dance. I bring the play into context with contemporaneous discoveries in physiology and with the assimilation of dance music by the highbrowed genres around 1600. Two important spheres of the play are subjected to carnivalesque reversal. First, power relations: the exploited servant gets control over other people's bodies. Second, the relations between the rational and the supernatural: while money is treated as a purely magical gift, the impact of Dölla's Bewitched Fiddle could be regarded within a scientific framework.