Changing Times: The Mechanical Clock in Late Medieval Literature

Abstract

The invention of the mechanical clock, and the significant perceptual shift that attended it, provides a rich and underexamined context for reading Chaucer's works. Among social scientists it has become textbook wisdom that the late medieval invention of the mechanical clock transformed ideas about time. In 1934, Lewis Mumford wrote that By its essential nature the mechanical clock dissociated time from human events. 1 Later scholars have affirmed this view of the clock's importance: David S. Landes calls it one of the great inventions in the history of mankind—not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to moveable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organization, and personality. 2 It is surprising that literary scholars have so rarely tested these very large claims against the writings of the period. That the mechanical clock seized the imagination of fourteenth-century writers was pointed out by Lynn White, Jr., in 1962, but the extent of the verbal imprint left by this ingenious new machine on the literature of this period has only begun to be discovered. 3 An exploratory foray into a very large subject, this essay draws attention to the impact of clockwork mechanisms and the kinds of time they kept on the poetic imaginations of several late medieval Anglo-French authors, and it then looks closely at their influence on a single, but seminal, Chaucerian text, the Nun's Priest's Tale . All the late medieval authors discussed in this essay try in some way to tame or naturalize the new invention by a kind of associative thinking that belies the clock's objective, quantifying purpose. As an example to which we will return, the new escapement mechanism that served to regulate or moderate the movement of the mechanical clock was allegorized as Temperantia or Attempra(u)nce , the virtue that regulates the body and the will. Among the texts treated here, the Nun's Priest's Tale is particularly intriguing because it reveals both a receptive interest in the clock's proto-scientific potential to produce more exact