Little Nothings: The Squire’s Tale and the Ambition of Gadgets

“The world of the romances,” writes Richard Kieckhefer, “seems at times a vast toy shop stocked with magical delights.”¹ Kieckhefer’s popular history of magic in the Middle Ages thus casts the enchanting pull of romances as a fantasy associated with childhood. The toy-shop metaphor may seem odd for the medieval context, however. Following the work of Philippe Ariès, social historians have long surmised that childhood did not properly exist during the Middle Ages, a hard-scrabble time (apparently) little able to afford the trifles of childhood play.²

This assumption has come under important revision in recent years, a move corroborated by the discovery of large numbers of hollow pewter trinkets—many of them obviously children’s toys—found preserved in the riverbed of the Thames. Hollow-cast figurines of knights datable, from their depiction of armor, to c. 1300, presumably for boys; miniature metal tableware and pottery ostensibly for girls; lead-alloy hollow heads—including one that may be a Christ figure, a grotesque, and two that resemble a “caricatured Jewish head” with pointed hat, all of which may have been puppet heads;³ one remarkable hollow-metal miniature bird or fledgling, originally with moving parts that “enabled the bird to bob and its tongue to go in and out”;⁴ and significantly, a mold clearly used to produce quantities of toys. On the basis of these findings, Geoff Egan of the British Museum and Hazel Forsyth of the Museum of London hypothesize the mass-production of lead-alloy playthings, “more for a mass market than [as] the privileged treasures of a rich elite.”⁵ These artifacts suggest not only that childhood existed during the Middle Ages but also that considerable technological skill was dedicated to its entertainments. They also make one wonder why social historians have been so quick to assume a Middle Ages without children or childhood play—an idea that is, relative to the evidence, “virtually baseless,” as Egan puts it.⁶ On the one hand, these little nothings of medieval social and cultural production, the toys, gadgets, and frivolous entertainments surviving from the period whether in the mud of the Thames or in the pages of medieval romance have been catalogued in the work of such scholars as Kieckhefer, Scott Lightsey, or William Eamon.⁷ On the other hand, such productions are rarely featured in technological histories, despite the evidence they give of developments in technology.

Weberian sociology reserves technological advance for those things associated with production, not leisure, for usable, not “frivolous,” items. Histories of medieval technology stress the innovative power of flying buttresses, windmills, or cannons, yet ignore the drolleries of medieval romance, implicitly viewing them as trivial, not unlike the delicate ceramic glazes or Ming vases fashioned by Asian artists. Max Weber is of course the author of the powerful story of modern disenchantment, positing the historical transformation from a premodern magical sense of wonder in the world to a modern understanding of the world as accessible to calculation.⁸ Medieval toys seem disqualified on two counts: not only are they items of play, but they date from the time before widespread technological reckoning.

To be sure, there is much to recommend the story of disenchantment, much that resonates with the trackings of culture over the longue durée. Yet Weber’s work cannot help us to assess the productive impulse of this mass market in medieval toys. Criticism of Weber is not new: his earliest Marxist critics, including Christopher Hill and R. H. Tawney, pointed out the errors in his account of Protestantism; more recently Afshin Matin-Asgari, Wolfgang Schluchter, and others have critiqued Weber’s statements about non-Western cultures as predicated on slim knowledge of Islam in its various historical settings.⁹ In a survey of the field of Islamic Studies, Matin-Asgari points out the ambitious reach of these problems and calls for a rethinking of Weber’s “deeply ethnocentric” fallacy: “defin[ing] societies, or historical eras, primarily in terms of their cultural ‘ethos,’ often articulated in religion,” deserves to be rethought, especially since...