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ELIZABETH KING | Clockwork
Prayer
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to W. David Todd, Conservator of Timekeeping
at the Smithsonian Institution, for his continuous and generous input
at every stage of this story, in many ways his story. "Write no wrongs!"
he cheerfully e-mailed me at one point. I began this work while a Fellow
at the Bunting Institute at Harvard University in 1997, where I had the
help of two capable research assistants: Harvard students Syau-Jyun Liang
and Bulbul Tiwari. The following year Virginia Commonwealth University
student Adam Meuse worked for me, and it was Adam who found the article
"Putting Don Carlos Together Again: Treatment of a Head Injury in
Sixteenth-Century Spain" by L. J. Andrew Villalon. Librarian Jean
Scott in the VCU Interlibrary Loan Department tracked down an extraordinary
amount of archival material. German translation and much help in understanding
German sources was provided by Susanne Böer. Mary Flinn, writer and
editor, articulated for me the notion of a link between two kinds of time:
Catholicism's perpetuity, and technology's clockworks. Joe Seipel recited
on demand whole tracts of the Catholic Mass. The historian Jane Kamensky,
whom I met at the Bunting Institute, closely read the paper and helped
me detect the assumptions behind my own twentieth-century definition of
prayer. She wrote in a letter: "is it possible that the automaton
is praying, perpetually, for its own (Diego's) canonization? . . . perhaps
the monk is not celebrating Diego's canonization, but is somehow part
of the campaign to make it happen?" It was Jane who directed me to
Keith Thomas' book Religion and the Decline of Magic. Most recently,
Fredrika H. Jacobs, Cultural Historian at VCU, offered crucial suggestions
about the interrelationship of Church and theater. L. J. Andrew Villalon
himself, whose work on Don Carlos and San Diego is central to this paper,
agreed to read my final drafts, and gave essential criticism and comment.
I am grateful to Historian Alex Keller at the University of Leicester
for his view of aspects of the work of Juanelo Turriano. I must again
thank Teresita Fernandez for helping me find Father Servus Gieben. The
website, let me mention here, for the Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini
in Rome is http://istcap.org. My suspense on sending Father Gieben this
manuscript was met with impeccable scholarly generosity. His theory about
the monk is as astonishing a thing as the monk itself. And my own father,
physicist John S. King, helped me create a sense of structure in this
(as he calls it) dendritic tale. For Evelyn Lincoln, as ever, my daily
gratitude. As I completed the manuscript, I felt I finally knew enough
to telephone the distinguished historian Dr. Silvio Bedini, now retired
from the Smithsonian Institution, to ask him if he still believes the
lute playing lady in Vienna is the only automaton that may have come from
Turriano's hands. "No," he said, "I think there's a chance
the monk is made by Turriano."
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