The wide-ranging study of medieval technology and the development of technical instruments in the pre-modern world enjoyed a period of energetic and interdisciplinary exploration in the second half of the twentieth century, but has abated in recent decades as scholars have hunkered down in their silos and focused on studies of particular objects: specific cathedrals and the chronology of their construction; the contents of a specific shipwreck; a single archeological site. It is thus refreshing to come upon Instrumentality, which attempts to discern broad patterns of cognition in a range of objects from technical instruments like the astrolabe to systems of knowledge organization found in didascalic literature. In this philosophical meditation, Mitchell explores and attempts to enlarge our understanding of “instrumentality,” freeing it from the narrow modern sense in which it is understood to refer to “the ruthless metrics and relentless efficiencies of technoscience under advanced capitalism” (vii) by recovering an earlier understanding, much explored by later medieval thinkers, for whom instrumentum was a far more expansive term that applied to all manner of things which served as an interface between a thinking person and the phenomenal world. Medieval scholars marveled at the beauty and potentiality of scientific instruments like astrolabes and armillary spheres, graphic tools like maps and geometrical models, as well as metaphorical tools like archery (often employed by physicists as a framework for thought problems), and admired the elegance of the educational system-building and curricula-organizations dating back to Martianus Cappella’s seven liberal arts. These were not mere transactional objects, but things that brought delight and played an active role in helping researchers generate the knowledge they sought. As the author puts it:
“Instrumentality consequently attempts to pry loose a subtle,
adaptable, itinerant, and generative concept from limiting
contemporary frameworks, and so asks what would happen if
technical objects and operations were permitted to affiliate
again with inventive, imaginative, pleasurable, or otherwise
life-giving pursuits.” (viii)
In the introduction, the author reviews a sampling of medieval literature concerning scientific instruments, beginning with the Sphera Solida and the astrolabe, and provides the justification and context for the exploration to follow. Medieval scholars viewed such instruments as more than utilitarian things that captured and presented information about the world; they were also “handsome and delightful in appearance’” (2), “uncanny, even charismatic things of underappreciated beauty and untapped potential,” (4), things that provided an “intensification of knowledge” as they were themselves “knowing things” (3). Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe (1391) “remarks on the intellectual authority and agency of the planispheric astrolabe, suggesting that the device may well know more than he can even tell” (3). The most rhapsodic of medieval writers on such devices imbued them with a nearly anthropomorphic quality as co-investigators with the humans who used them. The survey of well-known medieval writers from this curious angle is one of the more intriguing aspects of the book. From this starting point, “that instruments intensify and augment an individual and institutional capacity for work” (16), and with a larger and more lively understanding of medieval “instrumentality” established, Mitchell then applies his thesis to three areas of later medieval evidence that shape the three main chapters of the book: Intelligent Objects; Graphic Interfaces; and Learning Devices, or, Instruments of Language and Literature.
The thesis applies best to the first section. As established in the introduction, medieval scholars were quite enamored with the beauty and elegance of their instruments and thought of them as objects which not only gathered data but also intensified their own cognitive and aesthetic experiences. Devices explored include the familiar astrolabes and armillary spheres, as well as introducing less commonly known instruments such as the navicula, a timekeeping device that measures solar or stellar altitude and displays information on a ship-shaped dial (32-33). The imagery of everyday life (like a ship) is also explored in many metaphorical uses of terms like “mother,” “womb,” and “spider” to refer to the shape and design of astrolabes and the representation of their operations and data on parchment. Such metaphors persist in our modern usage (such as a computer “motherboard”) although their imaginative historical context is mostly forgotten today—the very sort of neglect this book seeks to reverse. Historians of technology and scientific instrumentation will find this chapter rewarding, although some may find the writing more florid than is commonly encountered in history of technology texts. To provide just one illustrative example, in winding down the discussion of the astrolabe, the author writes: “An astrolabe realizes in form and function the virtual adjacency of localities and polities, horizontalizing and miniaturizing vast territories in its compass; it congeals within its promising, portable body the very idea of transferability” (31). The author’s language is artful, and the ideas stimulating, but be prepared to reread passages, slowly, at times.
From the starting point of tangible scientific instruments, the book then moves to a chapter on graphic devices by which scholars interfaced with the phenomena being studied. The use of alphabetic, numeric, and diagrammatic instruments is explored though the same lens and tinged with the same wonder as the medieval scholars had shown to their devices for studying the heavens. Medieval writers marveled at the utility and enhancements to the intellect provided by etymologies, geometrical tools, and cartographic techniques, along with graphic devices that transferred data collected from physical tools like the astrolabe to parchment, sometimes even providing a flat, paper version of the device, complete with rotating paper dials, tucked into the pages of a book on astronomy. Such graphic instruments are equally beautiful and stimulating to the medieval mind as the more obviously “handsome” devices explored in the previous chapter: “[t]he conclusion is that such superficies as diagrammatic figures are not inert marks, but rather transitive and transformative objects, graphic figures with technical facilities that enable movement between domains, made to equip the medieval scientific imagination” (46). Even more illustrative of this thesis are the examples of medieval boardgames, such as is found in the thirteenth-century manuscript of Alfonso of Castile, which include both planetary and four-season chess. Both are games which encouraged the study of astronomy through pleasurable game play, moving planets like chess pieces around spheres with zodiac interactions determining success or defeat. (These games, unknown to this reviewer until now, may be themselves a fruitful direction for modern medieval pedagogy given the recent enthusiasm for “gamification” in the history classroom.) One final mention must be made of the simultaneously metaphorical and practical use of archer-imagery in medieval manuscripts, which is often used in discussions of triangles. In one twelfth-century copy of Gerbert’s geometrical text, an illuminated figure of an archer is pictured shooting arrows horizontally and in an upward direction to represent two sides of a triangle, with the distant third side—the invisible vertical line which would connect the terminus points of each arrow—being deduced via the geometrical principles described in the text; but there is also a delightful symbolic usage at play, as the illuminated figure is within the text shooting outward and beyond the text borders into the margins, “as if the special attraction of the device were its capacity for visualizing otherwise imperceptible dimensions outside the text”(62) [the image is provided as fig. 9]. The book is punctuated with several such intriguing images from the intellectual history and aesthetic representation of instrumentation.
The final section attempts to apply the instrumentality thesis to “instruments of philosophy,” such as the didascalic and heptateuchic systems by which medieval scholars attempted to organize and schematize all branches of learning, and makes discourses into the nature of words and logic, rhetoric and poetry, as instruments of understanding. Mitchell asks: “How did those affiliated lingual instruments function, and what work were they capable of doing?” (77). From this base, the discussion moves on to the medieval academic tradition of systematizing branches of knowledge that begins with Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, supplemented with what medieval scholars knew of Aristotle, and explores twelfth-century theoretical treatises like the Heptateuch of Thierry of Chartres and Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, and continues through to their Italian Renaissance descendants in the persons of Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, with a good smattering of Arab commentators along the way. Such works are more than exercises in summarizing, Mitchell argues, but become a tool for acquiring knowledge because “making anything new requires an inventory of preexistent elements out of which innovative works can be composed” (87).
Mitchell admits at the outset that this book is only a tentative beginning of a discussion, weighing heavily on the evidence he knows best and within a largely Eurocentric scope, with the understanding that “it is for specialists in other fields today to discover whether or how far particular ideas may be relevant within adjacent periods and areas of inquiry, and to take up and experiment with the central intuitions that have come down through the works I study” (15-16). However, he does include enough interaction with the adjacent Islamic traditions to demonstrate the applicability of his insights more globally. And it is a contemporary global exploration of his theme that is urgently hoped for. Leaving his medieval meditations, the conclusion takes a hard turn to the present. Mitchell bemoans the conditions of our current society, “poised at the edge of imminent global catastrophe owing to dehumanizing routines and alienating machines, ever more efficient extraction of natural resources, technological surveillance, and exploitation of labor” (93). But the way out of our current crises, he argues, must begin with a reconsideration of our relationship with and understanding of the instruments that have fashioned technocratic modernity. We are reminded that “[o]ngoing issues such as climate change, pandemic disease, viral disinformation, gender-based violence, colonial dispossession, and racial inequalities demand transdisciplinary solutions” (99). Mitchell urges us to rediscover the world of instrumentality before the advent of the narrowly transactional, profit-driven, exploitative model of the present—the world of technology before it was severed from the humanities. “As this book indicates, there is a chance to reimagine instruments as not just maximally efficient but also ornamental, intellectual, devotional, cosmological, imaginative, and more, all considered within the ambit of a tool’s capacity for work” (93). Instrumentality is thus equal parts historical study and a call to action that begins with reviving medieval notions of technological aids so that we might begin to find the regenerative elixirs and apply the healing salves our modern technocratic world so desperately needs.