Lives of bronze gods and wooden puppets: the material culture of humanoids in Seventeenth-Century Sweden

Living statues and artificial humans have a long cultural history. They are awe-inspiring because they are entangled with existentialist questions about reality, especially as regards the uncertainty of being. This article explores how humanoid material culture in its different forms was involved in the interaction between myriad human and non-human entities in seventeenth-century Sweden and in the broader context of the emerging global world. We discuss sculptures and automata that represent humans (or divinities or virtues in a human form) that populated and operated in different socio-cultural spaces in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century world that was looking into an ancient (classical) past on the one hand and discovering new worlds – geographically and metaphysically – on the other. Humanoid material culture affords perspectives on various seemingly contradictory, ambiguous, and uncertain ideas and processes of changing relationships between the past and present, us-ness and otherness, and humans and non-humans in the early modern period.