(Page 9 of 30) - The Anatomy of Pessimism: Outline of a Neglected Tradition authored by Dienstag, Joshua.

Dienstag 8 8/26/04

purposes, the timing and nature of the change are ultimately more important than the
exact causes which brought it about. While it seems clear that we can only speak, at best,
of a growing emphasis on linearity in time-consciousness (rather than, say, a radical
paradigm-shift), there are good reasons to think that such a change did occur. The most
prominent markers of this change were the sudden ubiquity of mechanical clocks in the
fourteenth century and the less sudden, but broadly coincident and ultimately very
widespread agreement on, and use of, a common calendar which marked the years in an
unbroken, ascending fashion.

In his acclaimed History of the Hour, Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum describes the

appearance of the mechanical clock and its radical effect on almost every element of
European culture.

It is difficult for us now to register just how differently daily life was

navigated in the absence of reliable time-telling devices. Before the mechanical clock
was invented (the exact date and location of the invention are unknown, but it almost
certainly occurred in northern Italy around 1300), the hours were generally not of fixed
length but waxed and waned with the seasons so that there were twelve hours from dusk
to dawn and twelve from dawn to dusk. Insofar as time was kept at all, it was done with
sundials (useless in cloudy weather) and waterclocks (very unreliable, labor-intensive,
and useless below freezing), and the hours marked were those of the monastery (Prime,
Tierce, Nones, Compline, etc.).

Minutes and seconds were something measured only

by astronomers; the degrees of precision we take for granted in ordinary conversation
(“Meet me in half an hour …” “I’ll be back in five minutes …”) were far from routine.
Short periods of time were often measured by repetitions of the Lord’s prayer.

The first reliable mechanical clocks began to appear in the belltowers of northern

Italian towns in the early fourteenth century. Inaccurate by our standards, they
nonetheless functioned regardless of weather and provided the first common, public
measures of time. Although these clocks marked a cycle of hours, they altered time-
consciousness in such a way as to clearly foreshadow modern, linear understandings.
First, of course, clocks had the effect of divorcing the measure of time from nature, and
made it into a matter of mechanical regularity. The day no longer began or ended

modern historical consciousness “is as Christian by derivation as it is non-Christian by consequence” (197).
That is, the modern sense of history should be understood as a ‘secularization’ of biblical eschatology – so
the structure of history remains parallel to the biblical while the ‘meaning’ of that structure is transformed
from something secular to something mundane. Blumenberg’s arguments parallel those of Koselleck in
placing the emphasis instead on intellectual developments of the late-medieval period, though he stresses
those that are internal to scholasticism as well as outside it.

Most of the material in this paragraph and the next is drawn from this remarkable book (Dohrn-van

Rossum 1996), along with Borst (1993), Poole (1998), and Toulmin and Goodfield (1965). In condensing
so much material, I have had to simplify, somewhat, the very complex, and still-debated, story of the
emergence of modern time-telling devices. But I hope to have done no real violence to its main features.

Monasteries had the greatest need for accurate time-keeping since the rules which governed the monks’

lives (starting with the original Benedictine rule) prescribed particular activities at particular hours. They
often maintained elaborate water-clocks for this purpose, with mixed results. Our word “noon” derives
from the Latin “nones”, originally, the ninth hour after dawn, which ought to be around 2 PM (but may
have been moved up to accommodate hungry monks, who were forbidden to eat before that hour).