The clockwork universe. German clocks and automata 1550–1650

KLAUS MAURICE and OTTO MAYR (editors), The clockwork universe. German clocks and automata 1550-1650, New York, Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1980, 4to, pp. ix, 322, illus., $55.00 + $2.00 postage. Academics teaching the history of science could do worse than spend more time in museums with their students. That, at least, would be so if all exhibitions were of the standard of the display of these clocks and automata at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1980. There, this assembly of German Renaissance machinery displayed within the space of a short perambulation the distillate of hours of lecturing time. The concepts of the universe as a machine, timekeeping and discipline, regularity and order, and the clock "as mechanical symbol for an authoritarian world" (p. 1) were all unfolded with a grandeur that turned reading into an arid pastime. The notion of God as clockmaker may seem slightly absurd when taught to listeners bearing digital time-pieces, but when confronted by such ingenious craftsmanship, that commonplace becomes a deeply devotional statement. This catalogue is a faithful and worthwhile representation of the Washington exhibition. For the historian of medicine more narrowly defined, the book might come as a sharp correction. For this collection contains a clockwork menagerie of pre-Cartesian animal machines from Diana riding on a stag, to a dancing bear beating a drum. It is all the more unfortunate then that none of the essays in this volume deals with the relations between automata and the history of physiology. Perhaps it is another one of those interstitial areas, between ideas and things, where the lines of pedagogy, scholarship, and tradition converge into darkness. Head still rules hand, but is not O.K. The fourteen essays prefacing the catalogue have that heterogeneous quality often found in such books. There is something for everybody but no-one will want all of it. The first two essays, by Otto Mayr and Francis Haber, are both adventurous attempts to see the Renaissance through the clock, so to speak. Mayr, in particular, draws together some useful conjectures on the metaphor of the clock and the government of the absolutist state. His causal arrow, though, runs rather conventionally. He finds the clock metaphor being used to "express" or to "illustrate" (p. 8) the status quo. It would have been interesting if, in his editorial capacity, Mayr had been able to find an author who could have written on the clockwork metaphor being used to shape and change the status quo. The other essays are all specific, thoroughly researched pieces on aspects of the clock in the Renaissance. They vary from 'Astrolabe clock faces' to 'Jesuit gifts to the Chinese court'. There is also an especially fine essay by Bruce Chandler and Clare Vincent on an example of the patronage of clockmakers in the sixteenth century. This is a superb volume, all the objects are represented by photographs, many in colour. Each is accompanied by a detailed description and references to further literature. The editor has done a job worthy of the objects he has illustrated. It is a great pity that those who did not see the exhibition in Munich or Washington will not get another chance. Christopher Lawrence Wellcome Museum at the Science Museum