Time, Measure, and Value in Chaucer’s Art and Chaucer’s World

In an essay on the development of late medieval intellectual culture, John Murdoch asks this essential question: “How and why did the near frenzy to measure everything imaginable come about in the fourteenth century?”¹ Joel Kaye’s answer, in Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, is that fourteenth-century interest in measure and value was closely tied to the growth of a monetized society in which understanding of the market and the pressures, needs, and desires at play in market exchanges had been steadily developing over the previous one hundred and fifty years. As such, this interest reflected a movement from a “world of fixed and absolute values to a shifting, relational world in which values were understood and determined relative to changing perspectives and conditions,” a change from “a static world of numbered points and perfections to a dynamic world of ever-changing values conceived as continua in expansion and contraction,” a world “newly accepting of the probable and the approximate.”²

As a civil servant—a controller of the wool custom in the port of London (1374–86) and a Clerk of the King’s Works (1389–91)—and also as a poet, Chaucer lived in a world of exchange, value, and measure. He was part of a late medieval Anglo-French court culture that produced a variety of works on these subjects. Philippe de Mézières structured his Songe du Vieil Pelerin on a metaphor of the coinage, counterfeit and “true.” Nicole Oresme’s De Moneta considered the source and value of money itself, arguing that money is the property of the people not the crown, and that its value is relational, not attributed or fixed. In his translation of Aristotle’s Politics, and even more in his translation of the Ethics, Oresme pondered how Aristotelian concepts of the mean can foster harmony and le bien publique in medieval political and civic culture. Christine de Pizan famously urged the importance of moderation and measure both in women’s roles and in the larger civic polity in her book on the life and deeds of Charles V. The popularity of Chaucer’s Melibee in this culture derived in part from interest in prudence, temperance, and the idea of the mean, the middle point where exchange value is equalized. One of us has previously argued that this interest in turn encouraged development of the value of the mediator, the person in the middle who evaluated and proposed the terms of exchange. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Oresme describes this function as a generic one and the moien as the estate of “gens qui conseillent and jugent” (people who take counsel, ponder, and consider).³

The later fourteenth century witnessed the spreading phenomenon of the civic clock, epitomized in many ways by Charles V’s public clock, called the Horloge du Palais (1370), built into a corner tower of the Louvre, from which it extended influence throughout France. In England, Edward III erected a series of clocks in royal residences at Windsor (1351), the Isle of Sheppey, the Manor of King’s Langley, and in London at Westminster (ca. 1366–70).⁴ As Clerk of the King’s Works, Chaucer would surely have been aware of these clocks, if not responsible for their maintenance. A mechanical model of temperance, the medieval clock’s verge and foliot escapement regulated the energy that drove the clock.⁵ The mechanical clock thus provided yet another kind of measure, dividing the day into equal quantitative units. The public striking clocks that appeared in late medieval cities eventually came to govern tasks, lives, and horoscopes. Less literally, but more interestingly, Froissart, in L’Orloge amoreus, imagined the clock as an appropriate metaphor through which to describe the complex emotions of love and lovers. Metaphor serves to render the incommensurate commensurate, and Froissart’s metaphysical conceit may reflect the then-current intellectual interest both in the incommensurate and in how to find the common ground through which to evaluate or...