A recent article in the Los Angeles Review of Books contained an arresting title: On Medieval Robots: mechanisms, magic, nature, and art. It was a review by Kanish Tharoor of a new book by Elly A. Truitt by that name. Opening the article, Tharoor describes a scene in the book where Richard II—in 1377 a boy of ten—was to be crowned king of England. On the day before his coronation he was in a public pageant in London, supposedly the first of such things for a British monarch, and at one point a golden angel deposited a crown on his head. It was a mechanical contraption made by a goldsmith company to astonish and amuse the crowd, and perhaps to ingratiate the goldsmith to the royalty encircling the king-to-be. I was hooked and read the article.

In describing Truitt’s book, Tharoor used the provocative term mirabilia to encompass mechanical marvels…