This chapter discusses how Renaissance stories of the golem of Prague, of Paracelsus’s homunculus, and of a talking brass head built by a natural philosopher in Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay show the fears and hopes embedded in that culture’s reactions to human invention—as well as an ambivalence to the idea of slavery, for intelligent objects are almost uniformly proxies for indentured servants. Moreover, the tales examined in this chapter about artificial servants foreshadow our modern ambivalence about our innate technological abilities. The power of their technological promise is countervailed by fears that these products of our own ingenuity will overwhelm us.
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