Renaissance Discovery of Time

Quinones, Ricardo. The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature Founded by William Henry Schonfeld 31 Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1972.

Phenomenon; horology; history

Preface

An Associated Press dispatch from Arkansas City, Kansas, appearing in the Los Angeles Times (April 3, 1968) announced that the members of the Chilocco Homemakers Club had bought a four-foot clock and placed it on top of one of the buildings of the Chilocco Indian School. The Homemakers were trying to encourage students, the report continues, to make use of the clock rather than the sun. The school superintendent was quoted as saying, “Reservation time means almost no time at all.” This indifference to more precise and mechanical means of time-telling created difficulties for the Indians who had jobs or who needed to get anywhere “on time.” in a chapter entitled, “The Voices of Time,” E. T. Hall, in his The Silent Language (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959). Recounts the measures that another superintendent took to make the Sioux Indians appreciate the value of time. Mr. Hall concludes, “He was right, of course. The Sioux could not adjust to European ways until they had learned the meaning of time.” We ourselves can come to appreciate what a unique part of Western culture is our sense of time, when we see the stumbling block it presents to people of another inheritance. We segment time, we schedule time, and when it is thus segmented and scheduled, we regard it as an indispensable, precious commodity. This modern sense of time has its more immediate origins in that period of our history which, more than any other, has served to separate our values and responses from the rest of the world— the Renaissance. Arch-westerner Kipling’s implied exhortation to “fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’ wroth of distance run,” while nonsense to a contemporary Indian, would make perfect sense, in principle, to a Petrarch of the fourteenth century, and a Rabelais of the sixteenth century.

One has only to look at the bibliography in the valuable and level-headed article by Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” History and Theory, Beiheft 6 (1966), to observe the wealth of available commentary on the Hellenic and Hebraic time senses.

xi.

I am of course not suggesting that the study of time in the literature of the Renaissance is virgin territory. There are valuable suggestions in Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934); in Sebastian de Grazia’s Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962); in Hall’s work mentioned above; in articles by Jacques LeGoff and E. P. Thompson… in Carlo Cipolla’s Clocks and Culture: 1300-1700 (New York: Walker, 1967). … in Alfred von Martin’s Sociology of the Renaissance (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1944), and Hans Baron’s owards a Sociological Interpretation of the Renaissance,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 39 (1939), 427, are concerned with the new time valuations of bourgeois society and humanistic culture… Specifically dealing with literature are Paul Meissner’s “Empirisches und ideelles Zeiterleben in der englischen Renaissance,” Anglia 60 (1936), 165; …Douglas Bush’s Claremont lectures of 1957, “Time and Man,” reprinted in his Prefaces to Renaissance Literature (New York: Norton, 1965); and Erwin Sturzl’s … Der Zeitbegrift in der elisabethanischen Literatur: The Lackey of Eternity, Wiener Beitrage zur englischen Philologie, 69 (1965) …. Georges Poulet’s studies… Erwin Panofsky’s “Father Time,” Studies in Iconology (New York: Oxford UP, 1939)… Samuel Chew, Rudolph Wittkower, and Fritz Saxl.

…lack of comprehensive Renaissance time study… This study had its genesis in a doctoral dissertation, iews of Time in Shakespeare,” presented to the department of comparative literature at Harvard University in August 1963.

xii

… Harry Levin’s much-praised The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1969)…

All of the men studied here went through more than one stage of growth—at one point committed to the public and ongoing world of time ha\and history, later deeply disillusioned, and still alter enjoying a return to their earlier commitments, although with a more personal and appropriate kind of style.

xiii

…critical transmitter of Renaissance Italian values to Tudor Englishmen, Erasmus, and his much publicized letter, translated as the “Epystle in laude and prayse of matrimony,: which had a particularly fruitful career in England of the sixteenth century.

One might say that there are two criteria which determine the worth of a theme. The first would be the question of what works of what authors it involves in discussion and to what extent it illuminates those works, and the second, a natural corollary of the first, would be the degree to which the theme seems to bring out the profile and essential dynamics of a historical period. When we consider time in the Renaissance we are obliged to deal with the most notable works of the greatest authors and are engaged, if we wish to pursue it to that level, with the very nature of the Renaissance and its most critical problems. I do not mean this in a causal sense, since in every writer the word “time” is employed and from every work one can deduce a “time sense.”

xiv

…the Renaissance seems profoundly practical and equally profoundly antimetaphysical. Time, in its ethical imperative, and the Renaissance, in its drive toward practical cases, would seem to be interrelated. This would explain the fact that modern anthologies of time, primarily philosophical in focus, have little Renaissance representation, since such evidence would naturally be derived from the world of literature.

PART ONE

Chapter 1: The Setting

For the men of the Renaissance, time is a great discovery—the antagonist against which they plan and plot and war, and over which they hope to triumph. It is for the sake of such conquest that they separate themselves from a more easygoing world of restricted rhythms and patterns. Victory over time is the measure of their heroism; a need for special distinction, one which rises above the anonymity of the everyday, compels them to seek the arduous, the unusual. Their energy and their desire for learning they contrast with the sloth and the acquiescence in ignorance which they consider to characterize their predecessors and contemporaries. It is important to observe that for most of the writers discussed in this study, for Petrarch, for Rabelais, for Shakespeare, and for Milton, it is precisely this new sense of time, calling forth energetic, even heroic response, that they use to distinguish themselves and the leaders of their new age from the preceding age. for Petrarch, medieval neglect had allowed the cherished classics to suffer the ruins of time; for Rabelais, the energy of the new humanism is contrasted with Gothic torpor that only sleeps and feeds; for Shakespeare, the sense of effective management of time that Hal acquires sets him apart from the ruined monarchs, Henry VI or Richard II, who presume on the older conception of natural, unimpeded processes or on a premature sense of being, and Milton in the Seventh Prolusion and Of Education shows how much he is part of this same heroic humanism. In fact, a chief ingredient by which both Rabelais and Shakespeare form their ideal Renaissance prince is time. and precisely what is lacking in the older defective representatives in this sense of temporal urgency and the felt need to utilize one’s time as vigorously as possible. Time is not an element that one divines in the men of the Renaissance: it is a force of their consciousness by which they themselves indicate the differences that set apart their new awareness of the world and their place in it from an older one. Time itself and temporal response are the factors in distinguishing Renaissance from medieval.

Precisely the society to develop this new time sense was the growing commercial, capitalistic, and urban culture of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The economic and social bases of the of the shift form the Middle Ages to the Renaissance have been comprehensively and expertly summarized by W. K. Ferguson, whose Europe in Transition is a modulated substantiation of the brilliant monograph, The Renaissance.

The medieval forms were relatively closed and local. The country manor and even the town guild traded freedom for security.

Marc Bloch has written that feudal society exhibited “une vaste indifference au temps.” But in the new economy and society of the urban, commercial world a closer reading was given time.

But in the history of “clocks and culture” what is new in the development of Western horology is the application of mechanics in a system of economic production. Prior to their remarkable development in the course of the Renaissance, clocks were products of art and science…

More than coincidence, a causal relationship can be seen in the invention of the mechanical clock in the period of early capitalism.

…Church had regulated the comings and goings of daily bourgeois life. Mornings and evenings she rang the time of the Ave Maria prayer, thereby indicating the beginning and the end of the work day. Her bells announced the time of the mass and of the forenoon meal; they were rung to mark feasts and deaths, fairs and calls to defense.

…Matins, Prima, Tertia, Sexta, Nona, Vespers, and Compline…

…multifarious needs of a bustling commercial city.

…in mechanics, a primeval element of Renaissance time: it serves as an ordering and controlling force over rich variety.

Then, in words that echo the specific time concerns of Renaissance writers and poets, von Martin…

“… Such an attitude ad been unknown to the idle Ages; to them time was plentiful and there was no need to look upon it as something precious. It became so only when regarded form the point of view of the individual who could think in terms of the time measured out to him. It was scarce simply on account of natural limitations, and so everything form now on had to move quickly. For example, it became necessary to build quickly, as the patron was now building for himself. In the Middle Ages it was possible to spend tens and even hundreds of years on the completion of one building—a cathedral, a town hall or a castle . . .for life was the life of the community in which one generation quietly succeeds another. Men lived as part of an all embracing unity and thus life lasted long beyond its natural span.” (p. 16)

For the Middle Ages time could be abundant, because behind the chances and changes of events man could sense a higher directing order. His life still ad religious associations with the universe, his beginnings and is ends were in the hands of a providential and concerned divinity. Because of his faith he could then exist in a an attitude of temporal ease. Neither time nor change appear to be critical, and hence there is no great worry about controlling the future. But for the new men of the Renaissance time was not plentiful but rare and precious.

[note to myself: all sacrifice in literature teleological]

But the problem here, as our writers sensed, is a psychological one—as most historical transformations are.

…it is no wonder that the Renaissance writers so dramatically conceive Hell and damnation whether Dante’s Inferno, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shakespeare’s Richard III and Macbeth, or Milton’s Satan. The diabolic is impaled on its own boundless desire. It is no accident that the world of Renaissance literature is a world on the move, with great emphasis on will and desire, and that all of these qualities are intimately connected with the changing temporal conceptions.

…Paolo da Certaldo… quotes the proverb “Who wants to eat now must think of it before now,” …think that time passed can never be regained. Be diligent and provident in all your affairs, and keep form laziness as form the Devil himself…

Domenico Cavalca, a Pisan Dominican, who was a popular preacher in the fourteenth century. His Disciplina degli spirituali…“Of Leisure and the Loss of Time,” “What Reasons Lead Us to Conserve and to Keep an Account of Time,” and “How Great a Vice It Is to Delay Doing good Works”…

A member of the preaching order, whose function was decidedly urban, Cavalca seems to have imbibed bourgeois values.

…Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio… could regard time as a precious commodity, an object worthy of scrupulous attention…