Rethinking Mechanical Automata in Early Modern Europe
Stefano GULIZIA
This collection of essays addresses the questions of whether, and how, automata and artificial instruments were able to articulate key issues of their period, particularly ideas about social hierarchy, economics, and philosophy of technology. The purpose of this short introduction is not to exhaust the relevance of these ideas in early European history, nor indeed to engage with them extensively. It would be enough here to clarify some preliminary questions of methodology and definition that continue to obscure our comprehension of how pre-modern automata functioned as a nexus of both archival and information cultures. As repositories „embodied‟ or constructed at a time of significant technological, intellectual, constitutional, and religious change, it is only logical that the automata carry distinctive material, social, legal, and political nuances.1