Description

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An insightful account of how medieval people experienced time.
 
Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people’s experience of time as continuous, discontinuous, linear, and cyclical—from creation through judgment and into eternity. Medieval people measured time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars, or the progress of the seasons, even as the late-medieval invention of the mechanical clock made time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm show how medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.
 

About the Author

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Gillian Adler is assistant professor of literature and the Esther Raushenbush Chair in Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Chaucer and the Ethics of Time.

Paul Strohm is professor emeritus of the humanities at Columbia University. His many books include The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made The Canterbury Tales.

Praise For…

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“The point of this brisk book, the latest addition to Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series, is not to give a comprehensive account of medieval people’s experiences of time or to propose any radical new theory. Rather, it offers a lively, insightful overview for the general reader, filled with wonderful nuggets.”
— Times Literary Supplement

"What Adler and Strohm offer . . . is the fact that, like us, medieval people lived among 'colliding temporal systems,' working with juggled information that came to them from a variety of sources and thanks to a range of devices. . . . Likewise, many of us (especially of a certain age) live now in overlapping time­scapes. We consult both an iPhone and a paper agenda. Those who are liturgically minded keep track of holy days along with secular marked time. . . The authors have enriched this accessible scholarly work with gorgeous illustrations that suggest how time was seen and imagined as well as told."
— The Christian Century

“Conceptions of time are evocatively and accessibly detailed in this new work by two eminent Chaucer scholars [who] convey the complexity and sophistication with which medieval people considered the passing – or cycling, or climaxing – days . . .  beautifully produced [with] plenty to excite any readers or students wanting a new perspective on the canon of medieval literature.”
— History Today

“A gentle journey through medieval society's, and people's, experience of time . . . Literary and visual sources combine to create a kaleidoscope of color and thought, and a momentary sense of the medieval mindset in its many forms . . . this book is not straight history, with its cause and effect and its linear progression. It is, instead, as nebulous an idea as time itself - a fleeting image both haunting and enchanting. It can linger, and it can accelerate, but it still ensnares: the reader will still be caught by its web. In its own way, Alle Thyng Hath Time rests between the tick and the tock, just as time did for medieval people.”
— Get History (UK)

"Alle Thyng Hath Tyme will broadly appeal to those who study the Middle Ages as well as those interested in human concepts of time and their representations in artwork. . . . One of the book's many charms is its wide range of beautiful, full-color illustrations of the concepts involved, drawn from manuscripts, stained glass windows, and frescoes. This engaging work will interest students and scholars alike."
— Choice

"Located at the intersection of history, literature and the wider humanities, the book investigates the nuanced and expansive approach to time evident in this period. Diverse literary and broader cultural sources inform the analysis, epitomized in the book's title which features a line found in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. These sources are drawn upon to expertly paint a picture of the experience of time in medieval society and can also stimulate reflection on our own relationship to time in the current context."
— International Journal of Law in Context

"In the Middle Ages, time didn’t just pass. Medieval people were 'temporal virtuosos', this book argues, living within great natural cycles, under shifting planetary influence, regulated by clock time with liturgical hours ringing in the air, generations succeeding generations while experiencing constant renewal and change. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme shows that an active experience of time – then as now – is an engagement with life itself. Make time for this book!"
— Carolyn Dinshaw, New York University