This paper examines human and animal bodies that were painstakingly assembled and programmed by clockmakers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in the German-speaking world. Known today as automata, these self-propelled mechanical objects have long been seen by scholars as exemplary of the early modern desire to replicate nature. But why, this paper asks, is this the case when all the extant examples of automata look unquestionably un-lifelike? Nothing about them—not their scale, their material makeup, their subject matter, nor their programmed movement—is naturalistic. In taking seriously what early modern automata replicate, this paper proposes a new mode for thinking of early modern mechanical bodies that sees them at odds with lived experience and not continuous with it.
