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

By conjuring up the anomaly of a “medieval robot” in her book title, Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature and Art, Elly R. Truitt provokes a reexamination of mechanism as the hallmark of a new scientific framework in the early modern period. In the book, Truitt argues that Europeans had been writing about automata—“devices with a self-contained principle of motion”—since at least the ninth century, even if they only began making such devices toward the second half of the thirteenth century, and only turned to consider mechanism the primary account of causality in the sixteenth century. The book offers a compendium of numerous exemplars in travel accounts, chansons de geste, and romances to demonstrate a deep cultural engagement with automata from the ninth to fifteenth century.

Truitt’s argument requires a thorough re-working of the category of automata itself, conceding quickly that the word itself only arose as a sixteenth-century neologism coined by Rabelais. Despite not having a clear medieval label, nor a simple material or physical parameter for the objects she includes in her survey, Truitt insists that these ingenious devices operated according to a consistent cultural logic. The medieval robot could be said to exist, Truitt argues, in a framework that placed mechanics alongside numerous other alternative explanations of causality. Specifically, the self-perpetuating qualities of an object’s actions could be explained, beyond the physical and mechanical, with recourse to intangible elements of hidden natural forces (i.e. “natural magic”), the intellect and the imagination. The turn to privileging mechanism in the sixteenth century and beyond, on the other hand, resulted in viewing automata as merely physical demonstrations of artisanal or mechanical virtuosity. As a consequence, Truitt concludes, rather than a major step forward, this change stripped out the most provocative challenges to defining nature, life, and death the automata concept had provided in the medieval Latin West.

Strikingly, in Truitt’s reformulation automata did not need to be either physical or real to be conceptually active and reside in a specifically European medieval imaginary. To make her case, Truitt highlights that these devices arrived first in literary descriptions, which grew in intensity in the twelfth century and preceded actual artisanal productions in the thirteenth century and later. It was only in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries that artisans introduced mechanical devices, like clocks decorated with automata figurines, into an existing interpretive and conceptual framework about automata. By placing the conceptual automata pulled from literary sources chronologically before their physical manifestations, Truitt emphasizes the role of imagination, art, and even magic, in the order of developing scientific frameworks in Europe.

In part, this is because actual production and theory of mechanical automata (powered by weight, water, or air), first developed in a third century bc school of mechanism (“the Alexandrian school” represented by Hero and Philo), had only survived in the east. In the introduction and chapter 1, Truitt reviews the early medieval Byzantine and Islamicate “ingenious devices” that had maintained these techniques. The ninth century Banu Musa workshop at the court of the Abbasid Caliphate for example, produced among other things, a notable clypsedra, or water clock with animated figures, as a gift to the Frankish king Pepin the Short. The superior artisanal production of such devices in lands outside of the (primarily francophone) Latin West reached her audiences through various means of legend, Crusades, and translation projects from Greek and Arabic to Latin.

In fact, Truitt considers a foreign or ancient provenance key to identifying “automata” in early and high medieval literary texts. She reasons that a non-European provenance for automata complemented a similarly foreign and ancient interpretive context for the uses of the medieval quadrivium—astronomy, arithmetic, music, and geometry—the domains of knowledge most closely associated with automated phenomenon. Tracing the provenance of the quadrivium, part of the classical curriculum of the seven liberal arts, to the medieval university through translation projects from Greek and Arabic sources, Truitt emphasizes its origins...