Scott Lightsey's Manmade Marvels is a remarkable and unique work on a neglected aspect of late-medieval society. Lightsey reveals a world of artificers and technologists, of complex clockwork devices and colourful automata: a world where supernatural, fantastic and exotic mirabilia were pulled from the imaginary realms of romance, and--literally--brought to life for the entertainment and exultation of war-fatigued courts. Since surviving examples of these machines are incredibly rare, Lightsey draws on literary and documentary sources, complemented by a range of artistic representations. Throughout the book he surveys the diversity of mechanical devices, their manufacture and the range of contexts they appear in. These fascinating insights punctuate detailed critical analyses of the deployment of artificial mirabilia in Langland's Piers Ploughman, the works of Chaucer, Gower's Confessio Amantis and Mandeville's Travels. Although Lightsey confines his study to this limited series of late-fourteenth century English case studies, his chosen examples are lavishly immersed within contemporary social, political and technological contexts. The result is an intriguing discussion of the complex and contested status of mechanical wonders in late-medieval society. More than simply ornamental end-products of human curiosity, they offer alternative windows into the social anxieties of generations growing up in the aftermath of the plague.
Lightsey's analysis begins at the very top of the medieval social hierarchy. His first case study of automata draws on the prologue to Piers Ploughman, which describes a mechanical angel that crowns Richard II during his public coronation in London. Here, Lightsey situates this marvel within a newly established culture of aristocratic visual display; a growing tendency towards luxurious ceremonial which would come to define the Ricardian court. Indeed, this clockwork coronation is seen as nothing less than formative for Richard's own attitude to the calculated display of majesty. Whilst these marvels readily fit into the sphere of courtly entertainment and extravagant royal patronage, they reflect deeper cultural undercurrents which were gradually transforming Western European societies at the time. Here Lightsey introduces us to a central theme in his work; the questionable morality of human prosthesis in late-medieval society. When the Lollards denounced Ricardian courtly extravagance circa 1395, they singled out those crafts which facilitated this moral degeneration, since, from their perspective "nature with a fewe craftis sufficith to need of man." The artificers responsible for Richard's angel were the Fraternity of St. Dunstan or the goldsmiths of London: the most important guild of metal craftsmen in the city and active in mayoral politics. Lightsey argues convincingly that by participating so prominently in the coronation pageant, the goldsmiths signalled both their loyalty to the Crown and their place in the civic political sphere. In many studies of medieval artefact classes, particularly ornaments, the agency of the craftsmen is sidelined, even ignored, in favour of the market. Lightsey on the other hand clearly demonstrates that mechanical mirabilia served multiple functions, and provided opportunities to communicate powerful meanings, for both producers and consumers.
Having introduced the importance of automata to courtly culture, Lightsey moves on to consider the origins of these marvels, demonstrating their close association with romance literature. Here, he draws on the multiple work of Chaucer, an individual who experienced the wonders and pageantry of the Ricardian court at first hand. Drawing on this experience as well as his personal technological knowledge, Chaucer situated his automata within a broader re-evaluation of mirabilia, shifting from the wonder of the supernatural, to an experience that could be packaged and rationalised. This trend, Lightsey argues, parallels the increasingly popular use of mechanical wonders outside the confines of the court, created for the consumption of a wider and more diverse urban market. He describes how the production of mirabilia for aristocratic gift-exchange developed a late-medieval "economy of wonder." The best examples of this are perhaps the elaborate clocks which begin to appear in a number of European cities at this time. Whilst many clockworks were predominantly constructed to power automata, these elaborate examples represent the shift from natural time punctuated by the changing seasons to mechanical time, illustrating an important difference between the medieval urban and rural life rhythms. Here Lightsey illuminates an important aspect of late-medieval urban identity, encapsulated by representations of the city as self- contained and isolated from its rural hinterland. The role of technology in constructing this identity is perhaps something which deserves further attention from scholars. However, Chaucer's treatment of marvels also reflects contemporary anxieties concerning their detachment from a divine source, epitomising the pursuit of materialism at the expense of spirituality, ultimately prompting moral decline. The late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are widely regarded as an age of high mass consumption, of unprecedented expenditure on luxury goods following the Black Death. The increasing popularity of mechanical marvels amongst the European aristocracy represents an important facet of this phenomenon, more so because of the transformation of mirabilia from something supernatural of divine origin to something artificial, explicable and morally questionable.
The negative effects of mechanical wonders continue to be explored in more detail with reference to the characters of Alexander and Arion in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Here mirabilia, particularly in the form of human prosthesis, are employed as a comment on flawed kingship. King Alexander's obsession with manmade marvels and his reliance on technology reflects the artificial morality of his rule, contrasting with the natural political harmony offered by Arion. Whilst Gower does not appear to have had the benefit of Chaucer's experience of English and Continental courtly marvels, the links with the extravagances of the Ricardian court, and their source--the king--in the Confessio are made all too clear. However, Gower's commentary goes further, for within a society where Alexander is popularly perceived as a quintessential hero, his monstrous incarnation becomes symbolic of humanity as a whole. Like Chaucer, Gower expresses concern over the moral implications of technological advancement, but conceptualises the misguided desire for mirabilia, specifically for prosthesis, as a monstrosity breaching the divinely-established limits of nature. Lightsey is to be applauded for incorporating concepts of bodily monstrosity into his discussion of automata, contributing to the resurgent scholarly interest in medieval monsters as expressions of cultural tensions. In fact, the collective perspectives of the Ricardian commentators conceptualise all mechanical mirabilia as fundamentally monstrous; a disturbing and irreversible challenge to the divine order, encroaching on God's monopoly over the act of creation.
Lightsey's final case study concerns a very different text, the fabulous Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Although this text and its contents are well known to modern critics, manmade marvels are never distinguished from the work's exhaustive bestiary of other mirabilia. What becomes clear in Lightsey's analysis is Mandeville moving "beyond curiosity to establish the origin of cause behind the objects," resulting ultimately in demystification. The Travels highlight such wonders as both deliberate fabrications, as conscious artifice, and as items of trade. Yet here too, Lightsey draws our attention to the underlying moralisation which characterises late-medieval ambivalence towards this fringe technology. Within the Travels, artificial mirabilia reflect both ends of this spectrum; from the mechanical birds of the Chan's palace representing human achievement, to the Old Man of the Mountain's false and degenerate rendering of paradise.
As Lightsey demonstrates throughout his book, the accelerating popularity of technological marvels provoked anxieties concerning their spiritual detachment, as well as wonder and delight. In Ricardian England, these anxieties ranged in intensity; from Chaucer's scepticism concerning human attempts to mimic the process of divine creation, to Alexander's prosthetics framing Gower's negative perspective of a fallen humanity. Late-medieval witnesses to the burgeoning culture of mirabilia were certainly no strangers to technological advancement, but the increasingly sophisticated feats of engineering, enabling delicately decorated masonry to reach further and further into the sky, were a world apart from the replication of creation; a divine prerogative. Over half a millennium later, these anxieties have not dissipated but have continued to evolve alongside technological developments, most recently in response to the growth of bio-engineering and genetic manipulation. Lightsey's work therefore draws attention to an important cultural flashpoint. The deployment of manmade marvels in fourteenth-century literature appears to represent the first serious debate on the social role of technology in the West; faith versus empiricism in microcosm. The growth of medieval empiricism is highlighted not only through the supernatural becoming replaced by the artificial, but from reliance on established knowledge shifting to a multiplicity of responses grounded in experience. Indeed, this is the paradox of late-medieval mirabilia that Mandeville grapples with: the desire for understanding, for predictability, for a packaged commodity, combined with the need to retain a sense of wonder, of uncertainty. In pre-Reformation Europe, both aspects were overshadowed by spiritual anxieties.
The book concludes with a plea from its author, one which can only be seconded enthusiastically by this reviewer. Whilst Lightsey's study focuses on marvelous automata in late-fourteenth century England, he refers to a number of examples from Continental Europe. Although the machines of the infamous park of Hesdin have been studied by various scholars, alongside the wonders manufactured for contemporary French courts, there is clearly a vast body of material which remains to be uncovered. Moreover, this material needs to be situated within the stream of contemporary ambivalence and anxiety highlighted so effectively by Lightsey's analysis. Future understanding would benefit vastly from developments in art-historical theory in recognising the multiple meanings which could be imposed on these artefacts, by both producers and consumers. Only through an appreciation of their multiple social and intellectual contexts, will the technological developments of late-medieval society enable us to further our understanding of this formative and colourful epoch. Manmade Marvels has demonstrated what can be achieved. It will hopefully inspire future pan-European research into this fascinating and socially contested material expression of the late- medieval imagination.