The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries by Matthew S. Champion (review)

Matthew Champion’s The Fullness of Time explores how particular temporalities constituted a varied and polyphonous experience of time in the fifteenth-century Low Countries—an experience, he explains, as for St Augustine, himself, and his historical subjects, that was numinous but essential to the unfolding of one’s existence. Champion is interested in how time was kept, described, experienced, and produced, and more specifically how temporality could be rendered meaningful through sound, ritual, and image.

Champion begins this task by setting out how various temporal ‘tracks’ intersected in the course of the civic life of fifteenth-century Leuven. Everyday life was understood, he argues, as bound up in a larger process of different intersecting temporal narratives—such that the rhythms of economic activity, religious hours, and calendrical calculation all interpenetrated each other. In this world of polyphonous temporality, bell-ringing washed across the cityscape signifying a broad range of temporalities: to signal the hours of the breviary, midday, the closing of city gates at dusk, the outbreak of natural disaster, and the regulation of the working day (p. 39).

However, the remainder of this work focuses on the implications of a distinctly Augustinian sense of the in-breaking of eternity upon everyday life. Kairotic, mythic, time could break into the chronos of time’s flow so that secular time in this context could be rendered meaningful and appropriate. Champion explores in chapters 3 and 4 how the experience of time, specifically the intersection of eternity with the temporal, was integral to the ‘temporal structures of particular emotional narratives that are supposed to evolve, for example, over the course of a year, or a week, or a day’ (p. 90). Champion argues that emotional narrative was mapped onto the liturgical calendar as much as onto the daily ebb and flow of the mass, the offices, and the secular rhythms of the day. Although the mass involved temporal narration of salvific history, liturgical time was also structured by the history of salvation and as such afforded instances of emotional expression that took a far longer view than our modern experience might allow. The eternal, ongoing act of salvation broke into the secular variously, depending on how liturgical time mapped onto each particular moment. Although far exceeding the scope of the work, analysis of the continuity and discontinuity of this sense of ‘higher times’ with earlier liturgical cultures would have been well received.

Champion does note the presence of different temporalities from the outset, but it is clear that in his analysis it is liturgical time that renders all these different temporal ‘tracks’ coherent. The in-breaking of the eternal, in Champion’s approach, provides the structure for the everyday. This is the case for the calendrical calculation and gospel harmonies (Chapter 5). In a complex way, by ordering time the subject could appreciate it from a bird’s eye view that approximated the view from God’s eternity. ‘This entailed a temporal experience of reading the book, where the single time of the liturgy was marked by entering and correlating multiple episodic frames’ (p. 141). In the devotional text, then, myriad lines of times and narrative were brought together into one moment. Just as one might survey episodic scenes from Christ’s life at once via their representation in a single work of art, ‘the reader might be drawn above the page to contemplate the arrangement of textual time as a human approximation of the divine intellective vision of time’ (p. 143). This is an Augustinian sense of memory essential to the visio Dei and it is intriguing to consider further what influence Augustine may have had directly or indirectly on this particular sense of time’s fullness—as well as how the absorption of Aristotle’s corpus may have mutated this sense. Finally, Champion describes how medieval visualizations of time were...