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  • Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse
  • J. Michael Colvin
Karen Elaine Smyth, Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve’s Verse (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company 2011) x + 187 pp.

Karen Smyth’s brilliant though frustrating new book explores the various conceptions of time evident in the poetry of John Lydgate of Bury and Thomas Hoccleve. Divided into six chapters, Smyth’s book first erects an “empirical-based [sic] morphology” to investigate the multiple and situational methods of reckoning and communicating time available to these two poets (5). Smyth takes Aron Gurevich’s understanding of time as a socially- and culturally-constructed quantity (akin to space, gender, etc.), and seeks to explicate the various means by which medieval thinkers experienced, managed, rationalized, and explained time. Smyth begins her book with a relatively simple premise: that the dominant modern discourse of time—as a linear progression of discrete, yet causally-related, concatenated episodes—was but one of many strategies of time-consciousness available to late-medieval thinkers. Cyclical time (i.e., seasonal, diurnal, etc.) and typological time (i.e., salvific, Providential, etc.) existed alongside linear time, and medieval thinkers employed various conceptions of time in a situational manner: different time-reckoning strategies did and meant different things. Time was equally “quantitative” and “qualitative,” both dependently and autonomously significant. Smyth reminds us that “texts use different discourses of horizontal, vertical, cyclical, spiral, linear, thematic, synchronic times, and ... there are many variations on these models, deeply rooted in the cultural specificities of period and place” (16). As histories of time-consciousness have tended to be largely technologically or linguistically deterministic, Smyth locates her intervention as a cultural approach to the question.

Smyth’s first chapter, entitled “Cultural Narratives of Time,” is her most compelling. A cultural narrative, per Smyth’s formulation, suggests a “vernacularity” (5) of “the conceptual categories” (6) devised to measure, manage, explain, and mark time; these narratives are the products of negotiation. She organizes this chapter into eight parts, each of which forms an intervention into a larger methodological argument about time itself. Smyth first “explores the idea that new terms in the vernacular for expressing time reckonings and duration of time were devised in tandem with technological developments” (15). Precision of time-reckoning, argues Smyth, led to novel ways of expressing the existence and passage of time; these new methods and expressions fall into a general category of “mechanization,” which Smyth believes encompasses the advent of time-terminologies and the indices by which they are measured. Smyth then examines the increasing awareness of measured time—and the tools employed to measure it—resulting in a historical consciousness of “living ‘within timeness’” (20–21). Smyth’s third subsection details the multiple coexistent temporal conceptions marked by various schemata and reckoning devices, including “religious feasts, mechanical hours, seasonal referents, astronomical calculations, subjective feelings and by ages of the world” (21). These [End Page 284] expressions were “context-dependent” and rhetorically significant to their circumstance. Smyth later details methods of time-regulation (30–33) and their manifestation in literature (33–51), respectively. Finally, section eight explicates the ambiguities of time-representation in late-medieval English literature, concluding that Smyth’s authors were well aware of the dynamic, sophisticated, and varied temporal consciousness available to their conceptual palate (56); authors were able to manipulate their expressions of time-consciousness by means of imagining and visualizing time in accordance with their ideological programs (57–58).

The remainder of Smyth’s monograph applies this analytical morphology to two exemplary case studies: chapters 2 through 4 explicate the various imaginings of time in Lydgate’s verse, and chapters 5 and 6 focus on Hoccleve’s works. Chapter 2 discusses Lydgate’s deployment of time-sensitive language by locating his Troy Book in a historical moment, concluding that the author “demonstrates an artistic awareness of temporal ploys within narrative structures” that “create[s] a discursive web of coexisting causal and disjunctive attitudes toward time” (78). Chapter 3 examines Lydgate’s The Fall of Princes and concludes that the author’s use of comparatives emphasizes “the context-dependent nature of [time] expressions; the coexistence of the objective and subjective [time-referents]; episodic and causal...

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