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Androids in the Enlightenment. By Adelheid Voskuhl. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. 279. Pp. xiv + 279. Cloth. $45.00. ISBN 978-0226034027.
Adelheid Voskuhl's Androids in the Enlightenment is a beautifully realized account of two unusual music-playing, human-formed automata. Voskuhl shows us how skilled craftsmen produced such rare objects and how the objects themselves looked and sounded, with arms rising and falling, heads and torsos bending and turning, eyes opening and closing, fingers pressing the keys of a harpsichord and little padded hammers striking the strings of a dulcimer. This extraordinary pair of musician-androids took the form of women dressed in elegant court dresses. The first-a nearly life-sized, four-foot-high harpsichord player called La Musicienne-was made between 1772 and 1774 by Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz in the Swiss town of La Chauxde-Fonds. David Roentgen and Peter Kinzing of the principality of Neuwied in the Holy Roman Empire completed the other in 1785: it took the form of a miniature, one-foot-nine-inch-high dulcimer player called La joueuse de tympanon. Its makers contrived a resemblance to Queen Marie-Antoinette, to whom they presented it. Shifting her attention between the figures and their world, Voskuhl paints a subtle portrait of technology, work, commerce, and culture in the last decades of the eighteenth century. She argues that automata made "processes of creating cultural and technical modernities visible" just before industrialization took hold (6). The mechanical women were "not epistemically relevant...