Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life: Medieval Lives
Autor Gillian Adler, Paul Strohmen Limba Engleză Hardback – 20 apr 2023
Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people’s experience of time as continuous, discontinuous, linear, and cyclical—from creation through judgment and into eternity. Medieval people measured time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars, or the progress of the seasons, even as the late-medieval invention of the mechanical clock made time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm show how medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781789146790
ISBN-10: 1789146798
Pagini: 248
Ilustrații: 55 color plates
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.64 kg
Editura: REAKTION BOOKS
Colecția Reaktion Books
Seria Medieval Lives
ISBN-10: 1789146798
Pagini: 248
Ilustrații: 55 color plates
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 15 mm
Greutate: 0.64 kg
Editura: REAKTION BOOKS
Colecția Reaktion Books
Seria Medieval Lives
Notă biografică
Gillian Adler is assistant professor of literature and the Esther Raushenbush Chair in Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Chaucer and the Ethics of Time. Paul Strohm is professor emeritus of the humanities at Columbia University. His many books include The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made The Canterbury Tales.
Extras
Medieval people lived among colliding temporal systems. Rural workers (that is, the great majority of the populace) inhabited a natural timescape in which sunrise and sunset, the varying seasons, the tides and the motions of moon and stars governed choices and actions. Monks and clerics and lay devotees lived according to a finely developed and highly prescriptive liturgical calendar that shaped their daily prayers and the progress of their devotional year. Meanwhile, the advent and public display of mechanical clocks were opening additional possibilities of measured time, dictating new uniformity to the conduct of commercial affairs and to devotional observances. As a result, people lived their lives in more than one system, proving highly adept at juggling multiple and contending experiences of time.
Medieval lives were, moreover, lived within a temporal horizon at least as expansive as our own. Conceptions of time embraced its smallest unit, the atom or ‘athomus’, defned by the author of the speculative Cloud of Unknowing as ‘the schortest werk of all that man may imagin . . . the leest partie of time . . . so litil that, for the littilnes of it, it is undepartable [indivisible] and neighhond [nearly] incomprehensible’. At the other extreme lay God’s eternity, a macro-time, or no longer time at all – an inalterable continuum. This is described in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, the sixth-century author of the Latin Consolation of Philosophy, as ‘the endles spaces of eternite’. Augustine contrasts the immeasurable immobility of this expanse of time with the saeculum or restless world of human endeavour, calling it ‘ever still-standing eternity’.
Between these extremes – time so irreducible as to be invisible and time so infnitely protracted as to become inalterable – lies that saeculum, or timebound world, in which medieval lives were actually lived. This is what medieval people thought of as the ‘transitory’ world, a world of temporal instability but nevertheless one in which passing time could be comprehended, measured, evaluated and employed.
Just as medieval people were flexible in their views of time and duration, so were they receptive to its varied patternings, the different shapes time might assume. People measured time with a range of devices, including astrolabes with which to make celestial observations, sundials, dripping water and burning candles, as well as that transformative medieval innovation, the mechanical clock. As we review medieval timekeeping protocols and practices, one constant element will be the ingenuity with which different systems of timekeeping and different philosophies of time were deployed. Medieval people at all levels of sophistication were, if anything, more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities. An ability to reconcile a multiplicity of systems should not be considered a symptom of confusion or scientific ineptitude. Rather, in their employment of multiple timekeeping systems, medieval people felt no pressure to choose among them, and instead demonstrated both virtuosity and sophistication in their application and use.
(…)
Here we offer an introductory look at different medieval approaches to the measurement of time. We begin with ordinary and intuitive systems based on natural and seasonal change: movements of stars and planets, the division of days and nights, the hours of the day, the change of seasons and other phenomena that register time’s passage. Closely related to such cyclical systems is the Church’s own liturgy, with its annual round of devotions and its division of the day into hours of prayer. Then to be considered are various ingenious attempts at a more systematic measurement of time, climaxing in the emergence of the mechanical clock and its rapid and transformative late medieval introduction.
Medieval lives were, moreover, lived within a temporal horizon at least as expansive as our own. Conceptions of time embraced its smallest unit, the atom or ‘athomus’, defned by the author of the speculative Cloud of Unknowing as ‘the schortest werk of all that man may imagin . . . the leest partie of time . . . so litil that, for the littilnes of it, it is undepartable [indivisible] and neighhond [nearly] incomprehensible’. At the other extreme lay God’s eternity, a macro-time, or no longer time at all – an inalterable continuum. This is described in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, the sixth-century author of the Latin Consolation of Philosophy, as ‘the endles spaces of eternite’. Augustine contrasts the immeasurable immobility of this expanse of time with the saeculum or restless world of human endeavour, calling it ‘ever still-standing eternity’.
Between these extremes – time so irreducible as to be invisible and time so infnitely protracted as to become inalterable – lies that saeculum, or timebound world, in which medieval lives were actually lived. This is what medieval people thought of as the ‘transitory’ world, a world of temporal instability but nevertheless one in which passing time could be comprehended, measured, evaluated and employed.
Just as medieval people were flexible in their views of time and duration, so were they receptive to its varied patternings, the different shapes time might assume. People measured time with a range of devices, including astrolabes with which to make celestial observations, sundials, dripping water and burning candles, as well as that transformative medieval innovation, the mechanical clock. As we review medieval timekeeping protocols and practices, one constant element will be the ingenuity with which different systems of timekeeping and different philosophies of time were deployed. Medieval people at all levels of sophistication were, if anything, more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal possibilities. An ability to reconcile a multiplicity of systems should not be considered a symptom of confusion or scientific ineptitude. Rather, in their employment of multiple timekeeping systems, medieval people felt no pressure to choose among them, and instead demonstrated both virtuosity and sophistication in their application and use.
(…)
Here we offer an introductory look at different medieval approaches to the measurement of time. We begin with ordinary and intuitive systems based on natural and seasonal change: movements of stars and planets, the division of days and nights, the hours of the day, the change of seasons and other phenomena that register time’s passage. Closely related to such cyclical systems is the Church’s own liturgy, with its annual round of devotions and its division of the day into hours of prayer. Then to be considered are various ingenious attempts at a more systematic measurement of time, climaxing in the emergence of the mechanical clock and its rapid and transformative late medieval introduction.
Recenzii
“The point of this brisk book, the latest addition to Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series, is not to give a comprehensive account of medieval people’s experiences of time or to propose any radical new theory. Rather, it offers a lively, insightful overview for the general reader, filled with wonderful nuggets.”
“Conceptions of time are evocatively and accessibly detailed in this new work by two eminent Chaucer scholars [who] convey the complexity and sophistication with which medieval people considered the passing – or cycling, or climaxing – days . . . beautifully produced [with] plenty to excite any readers or students wanting a new perspective on the canon of medieval literature.”
“A gentle journey through medieval society's, and people's, experience of time . . . Literary and visual sources combine to create a kaleidoscope of color and thought, and a momentary sense of the medieval mindset in its many forms . . . this book is not straight history, with its cause and effect and its linear progression. It is, instead, as nebulous an idea as time itself - a fleeting image both haunting and enchanting. It can linger, and it can accelerate, but it still ensnares: the reader will still be caught by its web. In its own way, Alle Thyng Hath Time rests between the tick and the tock, just as time did for medieval people.”
"Alle Thyng Hath Tyme will broadly appeal to those who study the Middle Ages as well as those interested in human concepts of time and their representations in artwork. . . . One of the book's many charms is its wide range of beautiful, full-color illustrations of the concepts involved, drawn from manuscripts, stained glass windows, and frescoes. This engaging work will interest students and scholars alike."
"Located at the intersection of history, literature and the wider humanities, the book investigates the nuanced and expansive approach to time evident in this period. Diverse literary and broader cultural sources inform the analysis, epitomized in the book's title which features a line found in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. These sources are drawn upon to expertly paint a picture of the experience of time in medieval society and can also stimulate reflection on our own relationship to time in the current context."
"In the Middle Ages, time didn’t just pass. Medieval people were 'temporal virtuosos', this book argues, living within great natural cycles, under shifting planetary influence, regulated by clock time with liturgical hours ringing in the air, generations succeeding generations while experiencing constant renewal and change. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme shows that an active experience of time – then as now – is an engagement with life itself. Make time for this book!"