Gillian Adler

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. 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’. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Adler and Strohm take the broadest possible view of time. 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 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. 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. Such rejection also appears earlier in the book, when Adler and Strohm describe the ‘freewheeling temporalities’ of Julian of Norwich. 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.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Seb Falk is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and author of The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (Penguin, 2020).… (meer)