medieval illuminations april caledar page

For those who could not entirely structure their days through prayer, labor played a key role in informing the ritualistic counting of time. Ritual also aided in this, as prayers were said at certain parts of the day. First, day and night, cyclical events, structured the medieval person’s experience of day-to-day life. Time was understood through a few different mediums in the medieval period.

Bearing this in mind you might now be wondering, when did our understanding of time shift from cyclical to linear, and why? However, we, or at least I, tend to imagine time as a linear line, with a fixed beginning and ending. Labor and even religious ritual shifted with the seasons. Ritual was another important aspect that structured time and the use of medieval peoples’ days. Gothic art was deeply impacted by the medieval experience of time and, by extension, by the understanding of sacred history as characterized by a cyclical, ritualistic understanding of time as an eternal return to a perfect eden of past. Time was a cyclical phenomenon to medieval people, experienced and measured in very different ways than we experience time today. We understand time in seconds, minutes, and hours based on an invented system that was used and understood quite differently in the Middle Ages, although there are many overlapping similarities between medieval and contemporary time. Time as a measurement has always been a socially constructed concept. The way that we understand and perceive time today as a measurable and objective quantity is very different from the medieval understanding of time. One of the main types of manuscripts we have at Les Enluminures is the book of hours, and Books of hours are all about time. With the return to standard time from hot summer daylight savings time here in New York and especially with the ongoing debates about abolishing daylight savings, I’ve found myself thinking about time quite often over the last few weeks.

Les Enluminures, BOH 213, The Hours of Le Goux de La Berchère (Use of Paris), France, Paris, c. Why do we structure our days around dates and increments instead of around feasts and labor? How were days and hours understood in the medieval period? Was time measured differently during the Middle Ages in comparison to contemporary, “equal” time standards? To answer these questions, today we will travel back in time to explore the history of calendars and some special illuminations of calendar pages from The Hours of Le Goux de La Berchère. Why is this? The transition between seasons often makes us more aware of time and the ways we choose to apportion time during the day. Usually, we don’t consider the actual length of our day to be shortened, otherwise we could leave work at 3:00pm! There may be less daylight now, but the measure of the day does not change throughout the year.

Medieval illuminations april caledar page