![]() ![]() Across a succinct 214 pages Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm convey the complexity and sophistication with which medieval people considered the passing – or cycling, or climaxing – days. ![]() Such contrasting conceptions of time are evocatively and accessibly detailed in this new work by two eminent Chaucer scholars, published as part of Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series. Addressed to his ten-year-old son Lewis, the treatise, entitled Bread and Milk for Children in early manuscript copies, signalled Chaucer’s desire to bring the precise science of time to as wide an audience as possible. Yet if we’re tempted to assume that for Chaucer and other medieval people time was simply less scientific than for us, we need only remind ourselves that this ‘Father of English Literature’ also wrote a manual for the most popular timekeeping device of the Middle Ages: the astrolabe. His tragic hero Troilus, forced to wait ten days to be reunited with his beloved Criseyde, feels his world decelerating: ‘the dayes moore and lenger every night’. The slow drag of time – when we’re stuck on hold to a call centre or sitting through another interminable online meeting – may feel like a feature of modern life, but it was familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer. ![]() Temperance bearing an hourglass from Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, 1338. ![]()
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