Animating Empire: Automata, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Early Modern World

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. In Animating Empire, Jessica Keating recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political meaning they held.

The intricate gilt, silver, enameled, and bejeweled clockwork automata, almost exclusively crafted in the city of Augsburg, represented a variety of subjects in motion, from...