The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature

The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature features original essays exploring the automaton-from animated statue to anthropomorphized machine-in the poetry, prose, and drama of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Addressing the history and significance of the living machine in early modern literature, the collection places literary automata of the period within their larger aesthetic, historical, philosophical, and scientific contexts. While no single theory or perspective conscribes the volume, taken as a whole the collection helps correct an assumption that frequently emerges from a post-Enlightenment perspective: that these animated beings are by definition exemplars of the new science, or that they point necessarily to man's triumphant relationship to technology. On the contrary, automata in the 16th and 17th centuries seem to be anything but embodiments of a mechanistic worldview: Renaissance automata did not necessarily confirm for viewers a hypothesis about the man-machine. Instead, these essays show, automata were a source of wonder; suggestive of magic; proof of the efficacy of poetry; or an (often nostalgic) expression of recusant aesthetics. When the early modern automaton emerges, conversely, as a troubling figure, it is not necessarily because it unsettles the divide between man and machine, but between man and god.