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hrjTruitt, E.R. 2015. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN 978-0-8122-4697-1 ($55.00 hardback)
Somewhere in my social media, someone mentioned seeing this book at Kalamazoo (I think). It sounded intriguing enough I had a copy ordered so fast your head would spin. I don't have any specific ideas it might be useful for yet, but hey: medieval robots and automatons, I'm sure something will come to me.
As is usual with a book intake post, I've barely had time to flip through the pages at this point, but here's a brief survey.
Introduction: The Persistence of Robots: An Archaeology of Automata
Ch 1: Rare Devices: Geography and Technology
Ch 2: Between ARt and Nature: Natura artifex, Neoplatonism, and Literary AUtomata
Ch 3: Talking Heads: Astral Science, Divination, and Legends of Medieval Philosophers
Ch 4: The Quick and the Dead: Corpses, Memorial Statues, and Automata
Ch 5: From Texts to Technology: Mechanical Marvels in Courtly and Public Pageantry
Ch 6: The Clockwork Universe: Keeping Sacred and Secular Time
There's an extensive section of color plates showing illustrations of automata in medieval romances and related topics.
The book covers actual mechanical devices as well as the more elaborate ones in literature that were pure fantasy at the time. For anyone interested in inspiration for clockwork-punk stories, you could do a lot worse than to browse through this work.
Somewhere in my social media, someone mentioned seeing this book at Kalamazoo (I think). It sounded intriguing enough I had a copy ordered so fast your head would spin. I don't have any specific ideas it might be useful for yet, but hey: medieval robots and automatons, I'm sure something will come to me.
As is usual with a book intake post, I've barely had time to flip through the pages at this point, but here's a brief survey.
Introduction: The Persistence of Robots: An Archaeology of Automata
Ch 1: Rare Devices: Geography and Technology
Ch 2: Between ARt and Nature: Natura artifex, Neoplatonism, and Literary AUtomata
Ch 3: Talking Heads: Astral Science, Divination, and Legends of Medieval Philosophers
Ch 4: The Quick and the Dead: Corpses, Memorial Statues, and Automata
Ch 5: From Texts to Technology: Mechanical Marvels in Courtly and Public Pageantry
Ch 6: The Clockwork Universe: Keeping Sacred and Secular Time
There's an extensive section of color plates showing illustrations of automata in medieval romances and related topics.
The book covers actual mechanical devices as well as the more elaborate ones in literature that were pure fantasy at the time. For anyone interested in inspiration for clockwork-punk stories, you could do a lot worse than to browse through this work.
