Alle Thyng Hath Tyme
Time and Medieval Life
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 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.
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