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  • Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art by E. R. Truitt
  • Christoffer Basse Eriksen
E. R. Truitt. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 296pp. isbn 978-0-8122-4697-1 (cloth), isbn 978-0-8122-9140-7 (e-book).

In Orson Welles’s classic movie The Third Man, the antagonist Harry Lime tells a mocking joke about the boredom of peace and tranquility. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias,” Lime says, “they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” The cuckoo clock is a ridiculous object, the butt (along with Switzerland and peace) of Lime’s joke, the utmost example of a mundane and predictable mechanism, and as such provides a glaring contrast to the excitement and genius that the names Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci evoke.

At the end of E. R. Truitt’s brilliant monograph Medieval Robots we encounter what we might call a cuckoo clock, if a big one—namely, the cathedral clock at [End Page 127] Notre-Dame de Strasbourg. From this giant clock, built between 1352 and 1354, a mechanical rooster flaps its wings and crows once an hour to mark the passing of time. In the late Middle Ages, Truitt tells us, this magnificent cuckoo clock was considered neither ridiculous nor dumb; in fact, the clockwork was, at its time of completion, the most technologically advanced piece of machinery in Europe. Not only that, the clock of Strasbourg was also a grand cultural statement playing into religious, philosophical, and scientific discourses of the time, as it did more than just mark the hours, though that, of course, is itself a very useful quality. This clock also symbolized the order between the microcosm and the macrocosm, reminded the inhabitants of Strasbourg to prepare for Jesus’s return, and demonstrated the glory of God’s creation.

In Medieval Robots Truitt, who specializes in medieval science and technology as well as the history of automata, tells the compelling history of the changing cultural values of robots in the medieval period. She defines robots, or automata, broadly: “They were apparently self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects, and they mimicked natural forms” (2). This definition is not concerned with the actual machinery of the automata, and so we encounter a wide range of very dissimilar automata in the book: copper knights guarding a forbidden castle, mechanical monkeys covered in beaver skin, statues resembling two lovers, and a pair of talking heads foretelling the future. The subject matter of Truitt’s book is simply fascinating, and she does a wonderful job of letting this fascination stand in the foreground without drowning it in analysis or exegesis. This is not to say that the book is not well researched; quite the opposite, but Truitt makes a virtue of staying true to her apparent fascination with robots of all sizes and shapes. This is what drives the book forward and what makes it succeed.

With Medieval Robots Truitt makes an original contribution to a growing body of research on the subject. The last decade has seen the publication of a range of books dealing with the status of artificial imitations of living things. Worthy of mention are Jonathan Sawday’s Engines of the Imagination (2007, Routledge), Minsoo Kang’s Sublime Dreams of Living Machines (2011, Harvard University Press), Adelheid Voskuhl’s Androids in the Enlightenment (2013, University of Chicago Press), Jessica Riskin’s edited volume Genesis Redux (2007, University of Chicago Press), and her forthcoming The Restless Clock (2016, University of Chicago Press). These books are all concerned with the ways we humans have understood and constructed automata, and emphasize the fact that we have done this in completely different ways and for completely different purposes. While the utility of, say, constructing [End Page 128] a trebuchet or improving a loom seems rather obvious, it can be harder to grasp the direct utility of a machine constructed with the sole purpose of mimicking organic functions or human behavior...

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