Time's reckoning: Time, value and the mercantile class in late medieval English literature

In Book 11 of The Confessions, St. Augustine asks the now famous question, "What, then, is time?" But whereas St. Augustine is interested in defining time, I am more interested in determining man's relationship to time. The anonymous author of the early-fifteenth century treatise Dives and Pauper makes clear that God created the celestial clockwork to serve man. Man is not to serve time, he writes, but rather, time was created to serve man. Analyzing three late medieval English texts (the York Corpus Christi Cycle, Pearl, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), my project examines how the practice of time, who reckons time and how it is reckoned, in late medieval English literature serves as a way to measure the status of the rising mercantile class.;The purpose of my introductory chapter is twofold. First, I provide a historical overview of methods practiced and instruments used to tell time in late medieval England. This section pays particular attention to the material culture of time-telling and questions the significance scholarship has traditionally placed on the introduction of mechanical clock time to England. Second, I trace the main approaches to the cultural history of time in modern scholarship. Specifically, I explain how my work draws upon and departs from French historian Jacque Le Goff's famous thesis which views "merchant's time" in direct competition with "Church time." My readings of the primary texts, supported by historical evidence, indicate that "Church time" and "merchant's time" were not mutually exclusive ways of understanding and using time, as Le Goff suggests. Rather members of the Church profited from the increasing commodification of time, practices criticized by the anti-clerical literature of the day, and merchants employed religious notions of time to secure their superior social status.;As a civic event performed to mark and celebrate a religious festival, the York Cycle was directed by the powerful merchants' guild of York. The work of the cycle---redemptive, practical, and theatrical---is inextricably bound to time. While all late medieval Corpus Christi Cycles are organized around a typological time-scheme (based on the life of Christ), the York Cycle in particular invokes the theme of time as central to the issue of labor and production. My analysis of the York Cycle's temporal discourse, particularly the conflation of religious time with quotidian time, highlights the way in which the reckoning of time is used to assert rank and status, especially as that status relates to the mercantile class.;Perhaps no other poem from late medieval England better illustrates the relationship between the transience of human life and the permanence of spiritual salvation than the Middle English poem Pearl. Meditating on the death of a young child, the poem shifts between descriptions of a mutable earthly realm and an eternal heavenly realm. As the dream vision progresses through different locales, the poet imbues the narrative with landscapes, seasons, temporally loaded biblical allusions, and the medieval calendar scheme. In Pearl, time reveals itself in space. As the Pearl -poet employs various complex temporal systems and symbols, he links the religious and the economic, the spiritual and the social. In so doing, the poem addresses the unsettled status of the rising mercantile class in late medieval England. In linking, and at times conflating, the earthly and heavenly systems, the Pearl poet reveals an important underlying principle: the relationship between social rank and time.;As author of A Treatise on the Astrolabe and controller of customs in the port of London, Chaucer was intimately aware of time's social value. Examining the Miller's and Shipman's Tales, this chapter argues that the ability to reckon time functions as a means of asserting, and sometimes undermining, characters' social status, especially the increasingly wealthy mercantile and artisan class. For instance, the clerk in the Miller's Tale owns an astrolabe and can, reportedly, read what the stars portend. The Shipman's monk carries a portable sundial and possesses a profitable knowledge of the commercial value of timing exchanges. In both tales, the tricks hatched hinge on the trickster's ability to read time and thereby dupe two unsuspecting husbands.;My analysis of these texts reveals not only an increasing commodification of time during this period, but also a new understanding of how that commodity could be translated into social status, specifically in regards to the rising mercantile class. These texts show how late medieval English writers employed time-reckoning to function both as a signifier of social relations and the tool by which those relationships were established.