Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life, by Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm

This is a beautifully expressed and illustrated short exploration of medieval ideas about time. ‘Alle thyng hath tyme’ is a quotation from Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale, and this book shows the pervasiveness, complexity and eloquence of medieval thinking about time. Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm range widely—from technologies of measuring time, to literary treatments of the passing of time, the theology of time, and the subjective experience of time. It is elegantly structured, and full of telling insight.

The volume opens with a carefully articulated sense of the ‘colliding temporal systems’ (p. 1) which structured medieval life. The lives of many were effectively regulated by the pattern of the seasons: agricultural labour lay at the heart of medieval society. But time was also liturgical—days, weeks, months and years were structured according to sacred patterns laid out by the church. Alongside these ways of thinking about time, its mechanical measurement became ever more sophisticated over the course of the Middle Ages. The real strength of the book lies in showing the ways in which these temporalities were not in conflict with one another, nor simply overlaid one upon another, but intertwined and entangled—making of medieval people, as the authors put it, ‘temporal virtuosos’ (p. 77). Some of this analysis is underpinned by an unusually subtle reading of Jacques le Goff, whose notions of liturgical and merchant time are so often crudely caricatured; there is a wealth of recent historiography (for example Matthew Champion’s The Fullness of Time [2017], rev. ante, cxxxiv [2019], pp. 977–9) which would have deserved mention, but this is a relatively lightly referenced book. The first chapter ends with Chaucer’s story of the student Nicholas and his lover Alison merrily enjoying their ‘bisiness of mirth and of solas, / Till that the bell of laudes gan to ring’ (ll. 3654–5), a striking indication of interwoven temporalities, temporal and devotional.

The following chapter provides an overview of medieval technologies of time-keeping, including the tragic story of Richard of Wallingford and the magnificent complexities of the water clock. Once again, any simplistic narrative of the growing mechanisation and secularisation of time is carefully avoided by showing how many clocks visualised and measured a range of times: calendrical, the hours of the day, the influence of the planets, the liturgical structures, all depicted on the same clock face. And, lest we assume that the mechanical measurement of time somehow neutralised it, the authors discuss the ways in which measured time affected patterns of labour, and the intensification of moral judgements about how people use their time.

The writers then turn to the planets, and the medieval interest in astronomy and astrology. The workings of the astrolabe are explored, alongside the immensely complicated device of the computus, used in part to calculate Easter. Tracing the arguments around this reveals not only multiple temporalities, but conflicting ones: time could be the subject of intense debate. The complex relationship between cosmic time and human time—which is far harder to grasp for us moderns, despite our awareness of multiple temporalities—is explored via a discussion of Dante’s immensely sophisticated sense of the intertwining of human and cosmic time, subjectively, theologically and allegorically.

This leads into a fascinating discussion of ‘lives in time’. A trio of well-known figures—Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Thomas Usk—are shown in fresh light by exploring their engagement with time. Indeed, the analysis here is quite moving. Julian of Norwich’s mystic engagement with time was profoundly embedded in her sense of its multiplicity. Yet the authors show that she was also very interested in precise time-keeping, partly because mystics needed constantly to authenticate themselves, but more interestingly, because she was concerned to reckon her spiritual progress. Margery Kempe’s experience and articulation of time seems to have been idiosyncratic (as was so much about her). Tellingly, the authors write that ‘when she speaks of an hour it’s never entirely clear whether she is speaking of clock time or liturgical time; it is, presumably, an amalgam, mixed with a bit of intuition’ (p. 89). She measured time carefully to show her commitment to her own devotional life, while also experiencing time’s flexibility as it seemingly slows down and speeds up. Thomas Usk, on the other hand, lived a life of political vicissitude. His own account of this involves mapping his own experience onto a tripartite vision of God’s design for the world: he describes the past time of the fall, the present time when the world is being saved, and the final time of grace. By situating his political errors in past time, and his present loyalties in the second part, he makes a case for his own vindication in time.

Usk’s careful temporal structuring of his self-defence surely draws on the literary devices discussed in the next chapter, ‘Narrative Shapes of Time’. Time is shown to have been not only a structuring principle in many literary texts but a theme. A particularly fine analysis of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseide follows: the different characters are shown as permeated by different temporal subjectivities, experiencing and articulating time and its vicissitudes differently and in ways which drive the plot. The chapter finishes with the beautifully expressed assertion that ‘A supple time-sense is medieval temporality’s gift to poetic narrative’ (p. 121).

Time was heavily allegorised, and its moral connotations are explored in detail. Visual analysis of the figure of Temperance with an hourglass in the Sienese Lorenzetti’s fresco reminds us of the centrality of time to thinking about political rule. Time could also generate anxiety. Moralising about the potential wickedness of profiting from time grew ever more intense as it became clear that society was dependent upon such transactions. And the notion of Fortune’s wheel mobilised that anxiety about the overwhelming force of change. A chapter on the ages of humankind provides a useful overview, especially regarding the overlap between individual experiences and their allegorisation. Especially interesting is the ambivalence about old age: on the one hand decried, on the other elevated as an age of wisdom. The book finishes, appropriately, with a chapter about the end of time. It is a fitting way to explore the medieval sense of time as both linear and cyclical, and the sense of awe that medieval people expressed before the ineffability of divine temporality.

In short, this is a beautifully written book. It is a little ironic that many of the texts it discusses are themselves not clearly situated in time, and there is surely far more to say about the development of ways of thinking about time, over time. But the subject of time will always demand more thinking, and the book delightfully reminds us that it is never over.