Abstract
The temper of human wonder is rooted in perspective, and this is especially so of the kinds of wonder circulating among the courts and cities of late medieval Europe, as artists and mechanics produced a variety of marvels to delight their courtly patrons. During this period, a vast array of marvelous objects were taken from the pages of romances and transformed by craftsmen into automated metal men and birds, musical silver trees, fantastic stage illusions, and elaborate clockworks, effecting these devices’ move into the lavish and “curiously ywrought” pleasure gardens that already provided courtiers with a sumptuous physical environment of courtly magnificence. These contrivances thus were engaged intimately with chivalric culture, that culture’s notions of the marvelous, and with the fashioning of courtly identity.
This thing, that hath a code and not a core.
—Ezra Pound, An Object
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Notes
Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 79–83.
Arthur C. Clarke, “Clarke’s Third Law,” in Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
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Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 19–24; on the social “increment being sought [in prestige-based pre-industrial commodity exchange] is in reputation, name, or fame, with the critical form of capital for producing this profit being people,” p. 19.
For an early example, see Gerard Brett, “The Automata in the Byzantine ‘Throne of Solomon,’” Speculum 29 (1954): 477–87.
In addition to meetings such as the automaton tree and birds built for the Khan’s visit to Paris or the Throne of Solomon, both noted earlier, see J. D. North, “Opus quarundam rotarum mirabilium,” Physis 8 (1966): 337–72, documenting the thirteenth-century gift of a craft marvel from the sultan of Damascus to Emperor Frederick II.
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Lesley Stern, “Paths that Wind through the Thicket of Things,” Critical Inquiry 28, 1 (Autumn 2001): 318.
Studies focused upon these works include J. D. Bruce, “Human Automata in Classical Tradition and Medieval Romance,” Modern Philology 10 (1912–13): 511–26
Merriam Sherwood, “Magic and Mechanics in Medieval Fiction,” Studies in Philology 44 (1947): 567–92
John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (New York: Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 27–6
and most recently, E. R. Truitt, “‘Trei poëte, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance’: Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature,” Configurations 12, 2 (Spring 2004): 167–93.
Robert W. Hanning, “Engin in Twelfth-Century Romance: An Examination of the Roman d’Enéas and Hue de Rotelande’s Iponedon,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 82–101.
Hanning, “Engin,” pp. 83–4; Stephen Perkinson, “Engin and Artifice: Describing Creative Agency at the Court of France, ca. 1400,” Gesta 41 (2002): 51–67; Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 41–57.
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Daston and Park, Wonders, p. 95. Regarding the transition in techne literature, see Jane Andrews Aiken, “Truth in Images: From the Technical Drawings of Ibn Al-Razazz Al Jazari, Campanus of Novara, and Giovanni De’Dondi to the Perspective Projection of Leon Battista Alberti,” Viator 25 (1994): 326–59.
Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 281–3.
Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, trans. Laura Gibbs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 62; see also pp. 210–1 for a list of Pygmalion-like stories from the classics.
See Derek J. DeSolla Price, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,” in Science since Babylon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961)
Bruce, “Human Automata in Classical Tradition and Medieval Romance,” pp. 511–26. The Virgil legend is given extensive treatment in Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Beneck (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966).
Also of interest to the topic of human automata are Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1977)
and Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 317–37.
George Ovitt, Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 51.
Daston and Park, Wonders, p. 112. For a comprehensive outline of the contemporary attitude toward mirabilia among natural philosophers, see Bert Hansen, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: A Study of His De Causis Mirabilium with Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1985).
Chenu, M.-D. Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 43.
For a brief account of Augustine’s treatment of marvels, see Jean Ceard, La nature et les prodiges: l’insolite au XVI siècle, en France (Geneva: Droz, 1977), pp. 21–9.
See Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 79–80.
Elspeth Whitney, Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990), pp. 1–18.
On flexible self-reflexive historiography, see David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. xvii.
Eugene Weber, “Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales,” JHI 42 (1981): 93–7
Joel T. Rosenthal, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
See chapter 2, in this book, for a detailed analysis of Chaucer’s equine automaton; see also Clouston’s addition to Fredrick J. Furnivall’s John Lane’s Continuation of Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale.” Ed. from the original ms. version of 1616, Douce 170, collated with its ms. revision of 1630, Ashmole 53, with Notes on the Magical Elements in Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale,” and Analogues, by W. A. Clouston, Chaucer Society, ser. 2, 26 (London: Chaucer Society, 1888, 1890)
W. A. Clouston, “On the Magical Elements in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, with Analogues.” Appended to John Lane’s Continuation of Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”, ed. F. J. Furnivall for the Chaucer Society. 263–476. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1888, 1890
and Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Jacques LeGoff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), passim, esp. pp. 55–69
see also Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 3–9.
For issue-specific discussions of multivalent material signifiers, see Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 51–62
Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Spatial Materialism: Grossberg’s Deleuzean Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 19, 1 (January 2005): 63–99, esp. 69–74.
Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 88–96.
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© 2007 Scott Lightsey
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Lightsey, S. (2007). Introduction: Clever Devices. In: Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230605640_1
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