Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life - Hardcover

by Gillian Adler (Author), Paul Strohm (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.