About This Issue

Time for Dante is celestial, not mechanical. Paolo and Francesca read of love “one day, to pass the time” (“un giorno per diletto”; Inferno, V.127). Count Ugolino wakes before dawn, recognizes the approach of the hour when he and his sons customarily were fed, and endures the passage of six days during which his sons die until, finally, his hunger overcomes his grief. Activity ceases in purgatory at “the hour that turns back the desire of sailors . . . and pierces the new pilgrim with love” (“l’ora che volge il disio/ai navicanti . . . e che lo novo peregrin d’amore pungo”; Purgatory, VIII.1–2, 4–5). Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy is structured upon the precise movement of the sun. The mechanical clock is a novelty in his world.¹

For Chaucer, author of A Treatise on the Astrolabe, mechanistic or closely quantified measurements of time, distance, and value are omnipresent. Chaucer’s quantifications are those of a man who served for over a decade as Controller of the wool custom in the port of London and for two years as Clerk of the King’s Works. His insertion of clock time may sometimes bears metaphoric weight. Symkyn, his family, and the two students retire when the time indicator would be at its summit: “Aboute mydnyght wente they to reste” (I 4148). The remainder of the Reeve’s Tale shows time, fortune, and succession on the move, as young Aleyn and John successfully displace the elder Symkyn.² Elsewhere Chaucer’s time-sense bears theological or political import. The Augustinian distinction between divine and human time is seen in the temporal distinction between the countless days that pass when Custance floats at sea and the more tightly regulated moments of patriarchal history when she is ashore.³ Chaucer may also mingle measure and value with gender and sex. Walter’s unrelenting campaign to “assay” Griselda’s womanhood ultimately gives a measure of the husband as well as the wife, while in the Shipman’s Tale a repeated yoking by rhyme underscores an equivalency of exchange between “frankes” and “flankes.”

The essays in this special issue situate Chaucer’s interest in measured time and measured worth in the context of his historical moment. The fourteenth century witnessed the diffusion of a new and very public means for telling time: the mechanical clock that was becoming a central feature of European urban landscapes. The organizers of this issue, Carolyn P. Collette and Nancy Mason Bradbury, argue that the invention of the clock and the significant perceptual shift that attended it provide a rich and underexamined context for reading Chaucer’s works. Their essay offers a helpful overview of that context, with the Nun’s Priest’s Tale serving as a central instance of Chaucer’s response. The tale shows Chaucer ruminating about the relation of time to excess and restraint. It reveals, they argue, “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.”⁴

The issue’s remaining essays add a variety of perspectives for examining Chaucer’s embrace of and resistance to the new methods for measuring time, distance, and value—and their meanings. Daniel J. Ransom hones in on the temporal and spatial references that distinguish Chaucer from earlier writers, insisting that we note also the frequent imprecisions. Dawn Simmons Walts ponders why the young scholar in the Miller’s Tale might own a rare astrolabe, and she uncovers a chronological dimension to Nicholas’s game-playing. Underlying the joke about fart division in the Friar’s Tale, there rests, as Glending Olson discovers, a theological debate between Bradwardian continuists and Wycliffite indivisibilists that depends on an interest in precise measurement. Cara Hersh pinpoints a new household space—the study—and she shows how its appearance in the Franklin’s Tale illustrates bureaucrats’ efforts to keep their calculations...