![]() ![]() Since their central argument is that ‘storytelling and narration require a commitment to time’s unfolding the greatest medieval narratives are inseparable from their theories of time’, their focus is on those great works of literature the function of time in the medieval imagination looms larger than its practical place in people’s lives. Why, for example, did astrolabes continue to grow in popularity for 250 years after the invention of the mechanical clock?Īdler and Strohm do not address such historical issues. Yet the development and spread of the mechanical clock, and its use alongside other timekeeping technologies, is a fascinating and important story that deserves consideration. ![]() The documentary evidence can be problematic too, not least because the Latin word for clock, horologium, was also used for quite different timekeeping devices, such as sundials and clepsydra (water-clocks). In the first place, early clocks were often replaced and upgraded, with metal parts melted down and recycled, so little material evidence survives. The rise of the mechanical clock is perhaps the greatest technological change of the Middle Ages, but it presents challenges for historians. This seems to be a reference to the clock time that spread across the cities of Europe in the 14th century, and which would have been audible to Julian from the clockwork-driven chimes of bells in the tower of Norwich cathedral, half a mile from her cell. But rather than giving the time with reference to sunrise, or stating that it came between, say, the liturgical offices of Lauds or Prime, she states that it began ‘about the howr of fowr’. ![]() Julian records the start of her first vision ‘erly on the morn’. Her dizzying visions transport this Norwich anchoress from the specific month of May 1373 to the time of Christ, from precisely measured moments to the span of eternity. Such rejection also appears earlier in the book, when Adler and Strohm describe the ‘freewheeling temporalities’ of Julian of Norwich. A particularly interesting section covers the ages of woman, which draws on literary and real-life examples of maidens and mothers, wives and widows, to show how women lived within – and sometimes rejected – a gendered timeline. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, went the popular medieval antiphon with examples including Boethius and Boccaccio, Dante and The Dance of Death, the authors evocatively link the arbitrary whims of Lady Fortune, the foreboding Father Time, the ages of man from innocence to senility, and the cavorting skeletons of the danse macabre. Perhaps the most captivating chapters of the book, where they make highly effective use of its wonderful full-colour illustrations, are those dealing with subjects such as the ages of mankind, the wheel of fortune, and Death. In the 1960s the French historian Jacques Le Goff drew attention to the multiplicity of medieval timeframes, juxtaposing ‘merchant’s time’ with ‘church time’ Alle Thyng Hath Tyme joins other recent works – most notably Matthew Champion’s The Fullness of Time (2017) – in adding nuance to this picture, showing how writers and artists could simultaneously hold and communicate several different, dissonant temporalities.Īdler and Strohm take the broadest possible view of time. Across a succinct 214 pages Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm convey the complexity and sophistication with which medieval people considered the passing – or cycling, or climaxing – days. Such contrasting conceptions of time are evocatively and accessibly detailed in this new work by two eminent Chaucer scholars, published as part of Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series. Addressed to his ten-year-old son Lewis, the treatise, entitled Bread and Milk for Children in early manuscript copies, signalled Chaucer’s desire to bring the precise science of time to as wide an audience as possible. Yet if we’re tempted to assume that for Chaucer and other medieval people time was simply less scientific than for us, we need only remind ourselves that this ‘Father of English Literature’ also wrote a manual for the most popular timekeeping device of the Middle Ages: the astrolabe. His tragic hero Troilus, forced to wait ten days to be reunited with his beloved Criseyde, feels his world decelerating: ‘the dayes moore and lenger every night’. The slow drag of time – when we’re stuck on hold to a call centre or sitting through another interminable online meeting – may feel like a feature of modern life, but it was familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer. Temperance bearing an hourglass from Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, 1338. ![]()
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