Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life

Description

A recreation of medieval people's experience of time. Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people's experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to 'atoms' or 'droplets' and extending to the silent spaces of eternity. They might measure 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 was making time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.

Gillian Adler is Assistant Professor of Literature and Esther Raushenbush Chair in Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She is the author of Chaucer and the Ethics of Time (2022). Paul Strohm is Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Columbia University, and divides his time between Oxford, UK, and Brooklyn, NY. His many books include The Poet's Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made The Canterbury Tales (2015).

'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, Julius Silver Professor, New York University, and author of How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time