ThoughtGallery.org > What Are Medieval Robots? An Illustrated Lecture with Elly Truitt

What Are Medieval Robots? An Illustrated Lecture with Elly Truitt

Centuries before Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Çapeks Rossum’s Universal Robots, before Vaucanson’s digesting duck, people imagined, designed, built, and pondered the possibilities and pitfalls of creating artificial people, animals, and other natural objects. Medieval robots are the hidden past of our robotic present, and they were ubiquitous in medieval culture. They appear throughout the Middle Ages and were used to embody complex ideas about the natural world and the heavens, including belief in demons and knowledge of mechanical engineering.

And the bio: E.R. Truitt is Associate Professor at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and author of Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), as well as numerous scholarly articles on medieval astronomy, pharmacobotany, courtly science, and time-keeping technologies. Her writing has also appeared in Aeon and History Today. She is currently working on several projects related to medieval technology.











When: Tue., Jun. 7, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Where: Morbid Anatomy Museum
424 Third Ave. Brooklyn

Price: $5
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Centuries before Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, before Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Çapeks Rossum’s Universal Robots, before Vaucanson’s digesting duck, people imagined, designed, built, and pondered the possibilities and pitfalls of creating artificial people, animals, and other natural objects. Medieval robots are the hidden past of our robotic present, and they were ubiquitous in medieval culture. They appear throughout the Middle Ages and were used to embody complex ideas about the natural world and the heavens, including belief in demons and knowledge of mechanical engineering.

And the bio: E.R. Truitt is Associate Professor at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and author of Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), as well as numerous scholarly articles on medieval astronomy, pharmacobotany, courtly science, and time-keeping technologies. Her writing has also appeared in Aeon and History Today. She is currently working on several projects related to medieval technology.

Buy tickets/get more info now