Includes index.

Introduction / Wendy Beth Hyman -- Descartes avec Milton: the automata in the garden / Scott Maisano -- "To me comes a creature": recognition, agency, and the properties of character in Shakespeare's The winter's tale / Justin Barnes Kolb -- Antique myth, early modern mechanism: the secret history of Spenser's Iron man / Lynsey McCulloch -- Orpheus and the poetic animation of the natural world / Leah Knight -- The mechanical saint: early modern devotion and the language of automation / Brooke Conti -- Arrow, acrobat, and phoenix: on sense and motion in English civic pageantry / Michael Witmore -- "More than art": clockwork automata, the extemporizing actor, and the brazen head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay / Todd Andrew Borlik -- "Mathematical experiments of long silver pipes": the early modern figure of the mechanical bird / Wendy Beth Hyman -- Desire, nature, and automata in The bower of bliss / Nick Davis.

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2013. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.