Prosthetic hands in early modern Europe were singular objects of artifice designed to supplement the natural body. With moveable fingers and flesh-toned paint, they incorporated practical and aesthetic functions in ways impossible for other kinds of prostheses. After all, silver noses could not smell, nor enameled eyeballs see. Iron hands, by contrast, could hold other objects. Made of metal, wood, leather, and paint, these artifacts have sparked modern imaginations since the nineteenth century, when pseudo-historical accounts arose attempting to identify the original wearers of surviving examples, often describing them as possessions of injured knights. The presentation of these objects in museums and print today predominantly reflects this tradition.
This paper argues that rather than these objects’ wearers, we should investigate their makers. The vast majority of early modern prosthetic hands have unknown provenances: they cannot be linked directly to specific historical persons. But they can be linked to craft practices, and through these practices tied to groups of people. Reading extant artifacts—extracting information by studying their material components—is crucial for finding clues to the world in which they were produced. Using several German artifacts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper reads prosthetic hands to explore how these objects were made and what functions they served in early modern society. It proposes that incorporating 3D modeling of these objects along with firsthand observation has the potential to reveal much about early modern intersections of medicine, technology, and culture.
