Changing Times: The Mechanical Clock in Late Medieval Literature

The invention of the mechanical clock, and the significant perceptual shift that attended it, provides a rich and underexamined context for reading Chaucer’s works. Among social scientists it has become “textbook wisdom” that the late medieval invention of the mechanical clock transformed ideas about time. In 1934, Lewis Mumford wrote that “By its essential nature” the mechanical clock “dissociated time from human events.”¹ Later scholars have affirmed this view of the clock’s importance: David S. Landes calls it “one of the great inventions in the history of mankind—not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to moveable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organization, and personality.”² It is surprising that literary scholars have so rarely tested these very large claims against the writings of the period. That the mechanical clock “seized the imagination” of fourteenth-century writers was pointed out by Lynn White, Jr., in 1962, but the extent of the verbal imprint left by this ingenious new machine on the literature of this period has only begun to be discovered.³

An exploratory foray into a very large subject, this essay draws attention to the impact of clockwork mechanisms and the kinds of time they kept on the poetic imaginations of several late medieval Anglo-French authors, and it then looks closely at their influence on a single, but seminal, Chaucerian text, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. All the late medieval authors discussed in this essay try in some way to “tame” or naturalize the new invention by a kind of associative thinking that belies the clock’s objective, quantifying purpose. As an example to which we will return, the new escapement mechanism that served to regulate or “moderate” the movement of the mechanical clock was allegorized as Temperantia or Attempra(u)nce, the virtue that regulates the body and the will. Among the texts treated here, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale is particularly intriguing because it reveals both a receptive interest in the clock’s proto-scientific potential to produce more exact quantifications of time, and, at the same time, a spirited and mocking resistance to the idea that the new quantitative time offered by clocks can possibly displace the richly qualitative time that had always shaped human lives in innumerable and profound ways. Like the larger work of which it is a part, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale asks its readers to test the sententious pronouncements of received authority against newer allegiances to experience, quantification, and proof. To the tale’s celebrated multiplicity of meanings, we propose to add its weighing of the rival claims of qualitative time against the new quantitative time kept by the mechanical clock. Repeatedly, excessively, absurdly, the tale warns against excess, repletion, and superfluity, including excesses both of sententious wisdom and of objective quantification, and thus it lightly advocates attemprance: tempering one’s time-telling to suit the occasion.

What Time Is It?

Jacques Le Goff’s famous thesis about the relatively sudden adoption of clock time in late medieval Europe describes the replacement of “Church time” or “God’s time” by what he calls “merchant time,” and his work has helped to inspire scholarship on the commodification of time in the writings of medieval authors, including Chaucer.⁴ We suggest, however, that changes in time-reckoning in the late medieval period were not so much a matter of displacement or substitution of one idea for another as of accretion and gradual, pervasive cultural change in which older and newer systems coexisted in dynamic relationship. As Chris Humphrey aptly observes, “the situation on the ground was a good deal more complex than terms like ‘Church’s time’ or ‘merchant’s time,’ as popularized by Le Goff, may suggest.”⁵ Humphrey cites documentary evidence from late fourteenth-century York to show that “a range of time indications was still in practical use after mechanical clocks had made their first appearance.”⁶ Clerical and merchant were only two among many varieties of time that medieval writers recognized...