The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution

Zakiya Hanafi's The Monster in the Machine is a fascinating "guided tour" of developments and transformations in the Western (most of the examples are from Italian sources) conceptualization of monsters from the late sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, ending with the death of Giambattista Vico in 1744 (x). She asks an interesting question: what happens to the classical concept of the "sacred monster" during the period of the alleged demystification of the world by the Scientific Revolution? Behind this question stands a more general assertion that Hanafi poses very clearly in the preface and conclusion: "A monster is whatever we are not, so as monsters change form so do we, by implication" (viii); moreover, "the monster is a concept that we need in order to tell ourselves what we are not. . . .these monsters are all of our creation and fashioned very much in our own image. . .it behooves us to love our monsters as ourselves" (218). In the first three chapters of the book, Hanafi explains the classifications of monsters with which she works. First, she outlines the classical explanations for the different origins of monsters: the monster as a "failure of nature" (Aristotelian natural philosophy), the monster as a sign or portent (Ciceronian divination), and the monster as a "wonder of nature" (Pliny and Augustine). In the third chapter, she delineates between the "descriptional attitude" and the "transformational attitude" towards monsters. In the "transformational attitude," which views monsters as "being induced or created for licit or illicit purposes," Hanafi locates the shift from the "sacred" to the "mechanical monster" (62). She then argues in the remainder of the book that the fears and horrors associated with the monster were displaced from the sacred (demons, monstrous births, barbarians, etc.) and attached to machines during the Scientific Revolution: "sacred associations left the biologically monstrous infants that were interpreted as portentous messengers from God and were displaced instead to mechanical monsters. Prodigy literature did die out, but that does not imply that prodigies ceased to exist" (94).

The book is full of interesting and illuminating anecdotes, such as the story about a theatrical, ritualistic dissection of stillborn conjoined twins in the Rucellai gardens in Florence in 1536 and the account of Athanasius Kircher's seventeenth-century museum in Rome, where machines created optical illusions to convince the visitor that his body had assumed a monstrous shape. Generally solidly-researched and well-written, it is a valuable contribution to the literature on museums, cabinets of curiosities, and wonders of nature in early-modern Europe, following in the tradition of Paula Findlen's Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994) and Lorraine Daston's and Katherine Park's Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (1998). However, the thesis of the book is in the end not fully convincing. Hanafi does not really show that the machine itself was generally viewed as monstrous, or that it was the object of the displacement of early-modern anxieties. The simple existence of automatons in the form of monsters in the seventeenth century does not prove that machines were in their essence feared. Although Hanafi asserts that "the automaton, the moving statue, is monstrous because it appears to violate the natural order" (i.e., that inanimate objects cannot move), the sources cited in the chapter do not support this claim (97). Although automatons were displayed in early-modern Europe and provoked "wonder,"-as did examples of children born with two heads and dog's feet- the chapter's citation of a few contemporary references to cyborgs and science fiction films does not show that this "wonder" is necessarily accompanied by the "fear and horror" associated with the monstrous.

Similarly, the lengthy readings of William Harvey and Rene Descartes that close chapter four certainly do demonstrate (as scholarship has already well-established) that the human body was perceived to be mechanical by many seventeenth-century scholars. But when the next chapter (on Vico's physiological theories as seen through his personal health history) opens by asserting that "if machines are monstrous, and the human body is a machine, then human bodies must be monstrous; and so, by extension, is the body politic," we seem to have missed a step somewhere-the first one (135). I do not doubt at all that the human body was viewed as mechanical by important early-modern thinkers and that this mechanization of the body was feared by some (including Vico); nor do I doubt Hanafi's premise that concepts of monsters are linked appositively with the conceptualization of ourselves. However, all these points taken together still do not establish that machines became monsters in the time of the Scientific Revolution. Indeed, many further questions arise from such a claim: were all machines seen as monsters? And what happens to deformed infants and exotic natives in the seventeenth century anyway? Are they no longer monsters because machines have taken their place? Or are they also machines? Unfortunately, such questions are never addressed, and potentially profitable areas of investigation, such as the golem tradition, are left entirely out of the book.

Hanafi's methodological principle of "seeing the connections" rather than "making explanations" allows her to argue by metaphor and example (x). In the end, however, this approach lacks the necessary rigor to tie the connecting pieces of her thesis together. While I admire the scope of the material in The Monster in the Machine, and enjoyed reading it, the book promises more than it actually delivers. The book would certainly attract a reader who is interested in exotic stories from the Italian Baroque or in the early-modern culture of experiment, but the cultural historian of the eighteenth century would want a fuller and more convincing treatment of monsters in the age of science.