Abstract

Since Aristotle, it has been common to understand wonder as a psychological state characterized by an absence of rational understanding. Drawing on this idea, a number of historians have suggested that the wonder which had long characterized the experience of automata, declined in the early modern period alongside the increased availability of theoretical treatises on mechanics. This article seeks to challenge this view by examining the relationship between rational and practical modes of technical understanding in John Wilkins’ Mathematicall Magick (1648). My aim is to show that a close reading of the second book of the Mathematicall Magick reveals an alternative conception of wonder as an experience of skilled workmanship that both tolerates theoretical understanding and is increased through practical experience. It will be my claim that the conception of technical wonder which emerges from Wilkin’s descriptions of automata, reveals how the concept of Aristotelian wonder is too reductive to capture the variety of ways in which mechanical technology was experienced in early modern England.