Kathleen
E. Kennedy, Medieval Hackers. New York: Punctum Books, 2015.
E. R.
Truitt, Medieval Robots: Mechanism,
Magic, Nature and Art.
Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Reviewed
by Robin Wharton (rwharton3@gsu.edu)
The
editors of Medievally Speaking
originally referred these books to my attention for individual reviews. As I
looked over both volumes, and thought about why the editors matched me with
them, I realized a double review addressing the combined relevance of these two
books within contemporary media and science and technology studies, as well as
medieval and medievalism studies might be more useful—and ultimately more
persuasive. As a medievalist who now works primarily in multimodal composition,
media studies, and the digital humanities, I see these books as responding to a
desperate need for more temporal and cultural breadth in these and related
fields. In Medieval Hackers Kathleen
Kennedy “considers how the medieval norms of commonness, openness, and freedom
of information are still present in our textual culture in the culture of
computer hackers” (2). E.R. Truitt, in Medieval
Robots, “excavat[es] the complex history of medieval automata,” in order to
“begin to understand the interdependence of science, technology, and the
imagination in medieval culture and between medieval culture and modernity”
(1). Together, these two scholars demonstrate the value of examining current
technological issues within a historical context that begins before the
eighteenth-century and includes histories of the global East and South.
Medieval
Hackers and the Value of Greater Temporal Perspective
Kennedy's
Medieval Hackers will be of interest
to anyone in medieval studies (or media studies for that matter) who has ever
been frustrated by scholarship in which eighteenth- or nineteenth-century
practices of reading and cultural production are taken as normative—the
starting point from which contemporary practice has “diverged,” or the paradigm
that digital modes are “disrupting.” Kennedy carefully guides readers on a tour
through two medieval communities of English textual production—one making
statutes, and the other bibles—in order to “establish[] the information commons
as a deep stratum of our present culture” (30). She builds a persuasive case
for viewing the proprietary regulation of information—whether it takes the form
of censorship or intellectual property—as the exception rather than the rule in
late-medieval England. As Kennedy describes it, over the course of the sixteenth
century, “various cultural forces worked together to gate this vigorous textual
culture and change it radically” (27). As a result, where, “to control access
to texts and textual manipulation was revolutionary” in the Middle Ages,
“[t]oday it is normative, and instead, arguing for open access to texts and the
right to manipulate them is considered revolutionary (or simply criminal)”
(27).
The
general historical movement that Kennedy describes—from openness to a closed
proprietary system governed by copyright—has been traced before, notably in L.
Ray Patterson's 1968 Copyright in
Historical Perspective. Further, Kennedy draws the idea of an information
commons from the work of legal scholars such as Carol Rose and Mark Rose, who
have argued that enclosure of the intellectual commons mirrored that of the
physical commons in the transition to modernity. She contributes to existing
histories of intellectual property law and fair use or open source activism in
two significant ways. First, she overwrites and calls into question the
technological determinism that often shapes histories of copyright law, in
which intellectual property regulation inevitably results from the invention of
the printing press. As she notes in “Homo Hacker? An Epilogue”:
The printing press was a tool of this change, but not an
agent of it. If hackers had not already pre-existed to take advantage of the
press, a revolution could not have occurred. In geologic terms, we might think
of the printing press as one chemical element that had the potential to be
acted on in a range of ways, to produce different reactions. I think the
revolution was not one of print, but of information technology more broadly
construed. (140)
Kennedy's
narrative reveals how technology, in this case the printing press, emerges from
our desires for texts and our ideas about how texts should be used and what
they should be doing in the world. The medieval hacktivism that Kennedy
describes in some cases pre-dates the technology that facilitated it. She
posits hacking not as a relationship to technology but rather as a relationship
to the legal, ideological, and textual building blocks of one's culture. She
offers a view of history in which technologies as well as texts are open to
interpretation.
Second,
and equally important to ongoing discussions in media studies and the digital
humanities, in chapter four, “Tyndale and the Joye of Piracy,” Kennedy suggests
that hacking is itself neither inherently democratizing or in service of
authoritarianism. She details how Tyndale and Joye fought over the customs and
conventions their particular community of early modern hackers should follow
when translating the bible. That rivalry to an extent provided both exigency
and a rhetorical foundation for the “Act for the Advancement of True Religion”
in 1543, which severely restricted biblical translation and editing. Kennedy
contends, “[t]he squabble between Tyndale and Joye provides a case study of the
range of pressures coming to bear on the information commons in the 1530s and 1540s”
(115):
In combination, these pressures were powerful enough to lay
down a cultural layer over the information commons, and restrict it to a degree
never before seen. This activity was profoundly cultural, however. Without the
cooperation of government and hackers, and perhaps the new practices associated
with humanism, such an occurrence would never have taken place. While these
events did not result in modern copyright, or even a modern notion of
intellectual property, the foundations for such development were now beginning
to be laid, and a new cultural stratum was developing. (115-16)
In her
study of these very early examples of hacker culture, Kennedy reminds us hacker
communities and open source projects do not remove power relations from the
equation altogether. Rather, they substitute alternative power relations for
those existing by default under the current regulatory scheme. We cannot
presume these alternative power relations are better simply because they are
different.
Medieval
Robots and the Value of Global Scope
In Medieval Robots, E. R. Truitt examines
the westernization of technical knowledge during the “missing millenium,”
beginning “at the start of the ninth century, with the arrival of the first
mechanical automaton in the Latin West, from Baghdad, and conclud[ing] in the
middle of the fifteenth century, when mechanical knowledge in Europe allowed
for the design and construction of automata within a framework of local,
familiar knowledge” (2-3). Within the first chapter, “Rare Devices: Geography
and Technology,” Truitt describes how in the medieval Western imagination
“automata” and the technical knowledge required to create them were figured as
temporally and geographically outside the boundaries of Latin Christendom:
Medieval literary texts, beginning in the twelfth century,
often contain automata in a foreign setting, at the courts of Byzantine or
Muslim despots, or in the distant pagan classical past. In some instances, the
writers gestured toward hydraulic power as the engines of these marvels
(echoing, though perhaps inadvertently, the mechanism of Harun al-Rashid's
clock); however, pneumatic power, astral science, magic, and hidden human
agency were also used to make automata. (27)
As Truitt
explains, automata were evidence of both the philosophical learning and
technical skill of the cultures that produced them. Medieval writers, however,
also viewed them as products of the “more extreme natural variation (in people,
animals, plants, and environments) . . . found at the edges of the world” (15)
and to some extent in the time before Christianity. During the Middle Ages, as
in the present, technology was power, simultaneously dangerous and desirable.
In order to acquire that power, however, medieval cultures in Western Europe had
to domesticate it first.
Truitt
explores that process of domestication in detail in chapters two, “Between Art
and Nature: Natura artifex,
Neoplatonism, and Literary Automata,” three, “Talking Heads: Astral Science,
Divination, and Legends of Medieval Philosophers,” and four, “The Quick and the
Dead: Corpses, Memorial Statues, and Automata.” In each of these
chapters, the author discusses the complex signifying power of pagan and
Islamicate automata in Western literary works, in addition to describing “changes
in the technological imagination from the late twelfth century to the early
fifteenth century” (98). By excavating their meaning from the medieval texts,
Truitt reveals how medieval authors “thought with” inherited stories of
medieval robots, using them, as modern writers often do, as a point of entry
for “inquiry into the definitions of life, the natural and the artificial” (3).
Putting their literary thinking with automata into diachronic perspective,
Truitt identifies in the Western medieval cultural imagination a “transition
from magical to mechanical” through which “automata increasingly resemble real
people and appear as naturalistic hybrids of natural substances and human
artifice” (98).
In
chapters five, “From Texts to Technology: Mechanical Marvels in Courtly and
Public Pageantry,” and six, “The Clockwork Universe: Keeping Sacred and Secular
Time,” Truitt considers how automata move from the page into daily life in
medieval Europe. These two chapters describe how mechanical craft became the
epistemological aperture through which obscure philosophy inherited from pagan
and Islamicate sources could be grasped and put into the service of a Christian
socio-economic agenda. Increasingly, European accounts include tales of
automata produced by Western artisans, and the technical skills by which
mechanical marvels can be produced become the demesne of newly powerful
domestic craft guilds (138-39). Significantly, considering Kennedy's
description of the medieval textual tradition discussed above, Truitt describes
a similar transition from open to proprietary technological knowledge that
preceded the emergence of controls on literary production:
As craft guilds became more established, they protected the
transmission of their knowledge in increasingly aggressive and sophisticated
ways. With regard to automata, this resulted in the uncoupling of secret
knowledge from morally problematic knowledge; however, automata remained
emblematic of esoteric knowledge, just of a different kind. Until the thirteenth
century there is evidence of the sharing and exchange of mechanical knowledge.
As guilds became more powerful in the fourteenth century, artisans began to
view craft processes and inventions as separate from material objects and
labor. Craft secrecy—limiting craft knowledge to guild members only—also
developed in this period. (139)
In this
careful account that considers Byzantine and Islamicate source material
alongside literature of the Latin Christian West, Truitt demonstrates what a
global perspective can add to our understanding of how knowledge is transmitted
across time and geography. Truitt offers a history of technology that
originates in the East and only gradually migrates Westward, in a complicated
process of artistic enculturation and scientific edification.
Medieval Studies, Media Studies,
Medievalism, and Interdisciplinarity
Both of
these books contribute to a rich body of scholarship in medieval studies that
recovers the European Middle Ages as a period of transition, one marked by
intellectual curiosity and relative freedom of expression, as much as religious
zealotry, bigotry, and ignorant superstition. Further, they make a persuasive
argument that medieval cultural forms and ways of knowing continue to influence
how we interact with technology in modernity through the persistence of those
forms in our law, art, and literature, as well as the technology itself in some
cases. As Kennedy observes, medievalists doing media or science and technology
studies offer an alternative and useful perspective:
[M]y method reads the new against the grain of the past more
thoroughly than some others because I employ [geologic analogy] as a
medievalist, a twenty-first century scholar at the bottom of the trench,
looking up and out at the strata, rather than down and in as do modernists
practicing media archaeology. Medievalists develop nuanced pictures of the
premodern world and desire to reveal connections between that world and the
modern, practices that fight the romanticizing tendency in media archaeology.
Medievalists grapple expertly with the difficulties (even impossibilities)
inherent in attempting a warts-and-all recreation of ancient culture. (5)
Medieval Hackers and Medieval Robots are meticulously
researched books, yet they remain accessible to interdisciplinary audiences.
Kennedy and Truitt both provide nearly all quotations of primary source
material in translation, and offer helpful discussion of different generic
forms for the non-medievalist. If their scholarship lacks any of the granularity
and depth of historical field that a specialist audience in medieval studies in
particular might expect, that is because these two authors strike an elegant
balance between grounding their work in the documentary and material record and
forging connections between disciplines and sub-fields. A particular strength
of Truitt's work is the integration of substantial visual as well as textual
evidence drawn from the primary sources.
Even as
they replace the flat Dark Ages caricature with a complex, three-dimensional
diorama, however, in both cases the description of forms of the past using
terms from the present ("hackers" and "robots") risks
collapsing one into the other. Very early in the introduction to Medieval Robots, Truitt shifts away from
“robots” to “automata” as a name for the “self-moving or self-sustaining
manufactured objects” that “mimicked natural forms” (2), and captured the
imagination of medieval authors and, much later, artisans. Kennedy, on the
other hand, retains the “hackers” moniker throughout, in order to make a point
about the continuity of the commons and its centrality to medieval and
contemporary forms of cultural production. At times, while reading both books,
I found myself wondering if the authors might have done better—as Caroline Walker
Bynum does in Holy Feast and Holy Fast:
The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women—to deliberately resist
the flattening potential of analogy by eschewing modern terminology whenever
possible, no matter how apt. For Kennedy and Truitt are doing intellectual work
similar to Bynum's in that they open up the field by recovering the semiotic
complexity of medieval epistemologies as a way to get beyond the limiting
binaries and ideological assumptions that circumscribe our thinking about current
cultural forms. Just as our modern understanding of “anorexia” fails to capture
and potentially misrepresents the various ways in which medieval women related
to their religious, economic, and political contexts through their bodies and
food consumption, so our notions of “hacker” and “robot” fall short as
descriptors of medieval phenomena.
Nonetheless,
by deliberately embracing anachronism in their terminology, Kennedy and Truitt
more clearly announce the immediate relevance of their projects beyond medieval
studies. Further, the juxtaposition enacted in both titles between modern
technology and the qualifier “medieval” insists on difference, even as it
leverages analogy. I did often question whether the implicit analogy between
pre-modern and postmodern “hackers” or “robots” or “automatons” was actually
useful. To prompt such a reaction, however, may have been precisely what
Kennedy and Truitt intended.
Robin
Wharton
Georgia
State University
