Wonder, Sorcery, and Technology: Contribute to the History of Medieval Robotics - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 23

This is one of the rarest, and oldest, instances of automata (before the Renaissance),
due inter alia to a virtually unknown clockmaker. In addition, this is clearly a device
which was rather designed for practical purposes than to impress an audience: the
automaton had become so familiar to the citizens of Orvieto, and to the yard workers,
that it was even given a name: Maurizio (distortion of the word “muricçio”, that indi-
cates the yard).
Fig. 1. UML sequence diagram of the episode of Gerbert d'Aurillac and Octavian's palace,
from William of Malmesbury's biography
4 Conclusions
As it is clear from the above, the Medieval landscape is fragmented and often uncer-
tain, and it must be frequently reconstructed upon secondary sources, such as literary
texts, or hearsay. All sources and cross references need to be verified by means of
careful philological and/or historical work.
In addition, such a thorough collection of sources would be useful only for docu-
mentary purposes, and would make it impossible to fully understand similarities and
differences in implementation among automata designed in different ages. To solve
this problem and not to reduce their works to a mere display of erudition, some