History worth knowing
How medieval Europeans thought about time
18 min
A deep-dive into the fluid, multi-layered, and surprisingly sophisticated temporal world of the Middle Ages, moving beyond the myth of the 'timeless' peasant.
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Show notes
Medieval daylight hours fluctuated between forty and eighty minutes depending on the season.
The astrolabe functioned as a medieval analog computer to synchronize solar and lunar cycles.
Legal and fiscal years were anchored to liturgical dates like Michaelmas and Lady Day.
Fourteenth-century mechanical clocks introduced the concept of billable merchant time for wage labor.
Medieval thinkers categorized existence into three tiers: human time, angelic time, and divine eternity.
The verge and foliot escapement transformed time from a continuous flow into discrete segments.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Elastic Hour3 min
- 3The Myth of the Timeless Peasant4 min
- 4The Three Tiers of Eternity3 min
- 5The Clock and the Merchant4 min
- 6The Reframe: A World of Simultaneous Times3 min
- 7Outro1 min
Sources
- Time and Timekeeping
- Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life, Adler, Strohm
- Time and the Medieval World | Issue 62 | Philosophy Now
- Medieval Time: Candles, Sundials, Clocks, and Stars - Medievalists.net
- Writing the clock: the reconstruction of time in the late Middle Ages
- The invention of time mechanical clocks and the age of the manuscript
- Alle Thyng Hath Tyme | Reaktion Books
- FPUScholarWorks
- edited by John R. Sommerfeldt, Larry Syndergaard, and E. Rozanne Elder
- How did medieval people tell the time? - History Extra podcast notes and takeaways
- Church time and merchant time in the Middle Ages
- Hours and Unequal Hours
- Business Cycles and the Sense of Time in Medieval Genoa
- The Medieval Concept of Time – James B. Shannon
- Unequal hours
- The New Science of Time and the Medieval Town Square – Medieval History
- The Light in the "Dark Ages" – Brad S. Gregory
- Tom Johnson · Take that, astrolabe: Medieval Time
- TIME’S RECKONING: TIME, VALUE AND THE MERCANTILE CLASS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE
- Time and the Middle Ages - Medievalists.net
- Time, Daylight, and the End-of-Year Calendar : Medieval Text Manuscripts
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