The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (review)

Zakiya Hanafi. The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. xiii + 272 pp. Ill. $59.95 (cloth, 0-8223-2536-5), $20.95 (paperbound, 0-8223-2568-3).

To chart the range of forms and meanings with which monsters were endowed at the time of major changes in natural investigations is Zakiya Hanafi's fascinating project. She argues that the "organic" monsters (p. 80) filling up late Renaissance books and cabinets were replaced in the seventeenth century by increasingly popular automata. As anatomical dissections became mainstream, the source of sacred terror, traditionally stirred by two-headed babies or other similar signs of God, was transferred to the mixture of pure matter and human qualities shown in automata. Since then the self-moving ability of machines has represented the quintessential feature of monstrosity.

The book focuses on Italy: while the first two chapters deal with competing attitudes toward monsters developed in the Renaissance, including the amazing grafting experiments carried out by Giambattista Della Porta, chapter 3 explores the range of automata meant to provoke anxiety and amazement in the visitors to museums such as Athanasius Kircher's collection. An engaging analysis of Alfonso Borelli's iatromechanics--that is, his application of a mechanical model to the human body--and a discussion of the work of Giambattista Vico, whose medical interests scholars have just started to appreciate, constitute the other substantial portion of the volume. With a surprising and stimulating move, Hanafi ends her book with a short discussion of the extremely rich field of seventeenth-century literary theory--in particular, the cultural power of the model of monsters in Emanuele Tesauro's influential work on metaphors.

Throughout the volume an extremely broad range of sources is brought to life, and this will certainly help scholars of the seventeenth century widen the geographical reach of their research and cross some still-too-rigid disciplinary boundaries. However, the reader is left with the uneasy impression that the author has not followed wholeheartedly the promising path of a cultural history of monsters in seventeenth-century Italy, and has wavered between producing a historical piece of work and delivering a more ambitious, and to me less interesting, exercise on monsters as a transhistorical category. Her theoretical framework--that every culture deploys the notion of monstrosity to label whatever breaks well-established boundaries between human and animal, pure and impure, order and disorder (both moral and social)--is too general, and in the end it loses analytical power. Frequent references to present-day concerns about technological monstrosity and cybernetic creatures may appeal to some readers, but since they are never really developed, they throw no light on the cultural and social meanings of machines and automata in preindustrial societies. Similarly, Marx on alienation, Gustave Le Bon's psychology of the crowd, and Theodor Adorno's Odysseus do not serve the author's laudable aim of making Kircher, Tesauro, and their fellow literati more vivid to general and specialist publics. On the contrary, such references take up space that could have been used to provide more-focused cultural and historical analysis. For example, in discussing Vico the author alternates between too-detailed and too-general sections, without giving a proper explanation of his complicated philosophy of history; the list of people belonging to Vico's Neapolitan circle and their works is too narrow a framework to allow readers fully to appreciate Vico's position with respect to the new experimental philosophy, medicine, and monstrosity.

One of the most intriguing themes of this book is monsters' place in the framework of the changing relations and boundaries between animals and humans, including the fascination for metamorphosis. The persistence of physiognomy and mythology as major cultural arenas where...