Materialism, and its approach to the body, are often presented as “mechanistic”: as signifying that the properties unique to organic, living, embodied agents are reduced to or specified as mechanistically specifiable properties that characterize matter as a whole. Indeed, from Hobbes and Descartes in the seventeenth century to popular automata such as Vaucanson’s[aut]Vaucanson, Jacques in the eighteenth century, this vision of things seems convincing. I am here to correct this inaccurate vision of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist project on closer consideration reveals itself to be significantly (a) focused on “Life” and embodiment, (b) much more intimately connected to what we now call “vitalism” (a case in point being the eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalists), and ultimately (c) a rather anti-mechanistic doctrine focusing on the uniqueness of organisms—whether we construe this focus in ontological or explanatory terms—although this point can be weakened if one emphasizes instead (d) the growing complexity and hybridity of mechanism itself. Early modern automata, understood as efforts to “model” life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common—including intellectually common—conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. Put simply and bluntly, they challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported “mechanistic” worldpicture (à la Dijksterhuis), its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand an attempt to understand ourselves and animals more broadly as flesh-and-blood, affective entities (that is, not just breathing and perspiring, but also desiring and “sanguine” machines, as La Mettrie[aut]La Mettrie, Julien Offray de might have put it). And thereby, in their way of serving as heuristics, as analogies, as go-betweens between claims about the nature of the physical world, projects of ingenuity, but also imaginative and almost phantasmagoric at times, efforts to intuitively model the “shadowy similarity” (Borelli) between machines and living bodies, they wonderfully complicate the story of early modern mechanism. In addition, as I have argued elsewhere, there is a specifically materialist approach to the body in early modernity, which is not strictly mechanistic (or is an outgrowth of a very pluralistic, loosely defined brand of mechanism) but retains a claim to be understood as materialist precisely because it is a reductionist, deflationary account of what it is to be in a body. Of course, there is not one concept of embodiment—some discourses are more naturalistic, others emphasize the irreducibly personal relation I have to my body, while others again stress its historical, cultural, and social “sedimentation”; I present the “materialist form of embodiment” in relation to these other traditions.