Contents: Introduction, Wendy Beth Hyman; Part 1 Creations, Creatures, and Origins: Descartes avec Milton: the automata in the garden, Scott Maisano; 'To me comes a creature': recognition, agency, and the properties of character in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Justin Kolb; Antique myth, early modern mechanism: the secret history of Spenser's Iron Man, Lynsey McCulloch. Part 2 Motion: Orpheus and the poetic animation of the natural world, Leah Knight; The mechanical saint: early modern devotion and the language of automation, Brooke Conti; Arrow, acrobat, and phoenix: on sense and motion in English civic pageantry, Michael Witmore. Part 3 Performance and Deception: 'More than art': clockwork automata, the extemporizing actor, and the Brazen Head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Todd Andrew Borlik; 'Mathematical experiments of long silver pipes'; the early modern figure of the mechanical bird, Wendy Beth Hyman; Desire, nature, and automata in the bower of bliss, Nick Davis; Bibliography; Index.