Clock Time

Clocks are one of those things that affect a great many others. In the case of clocks, it is because they affect one of our fundamental perceptions: time. But in the beginning, I think they had a second effect, changing, or perhaps sharpening, our common understanding of cause and effect. For a period of about five hundred years the clock was the most complex device in existence, certainly the most complex one most people would ever encounter. It was also understandable. One could look at the clockworks, big or small, and have their arcane processes explained. One thing followed logically after another. Effect followed cause; all was visible, orderly, and explicable. Is it any wonder that it would become a model for the universe and the divine order?

For the small percentage of humanity living in European towns, clock time came to replace nature as the timekeeper from the 1380s onward. No longer did hours vary in length with the seasons. They were uniform; urban workers were now expected to work the same length of time each day regardless of the month or the changing length of daylight.

Humankind was learning to live to an artificial rhythm, one at odds with the world around them but also with their own circadian rhythms. One wonders if they did not also become more irritable. People also became more used to breaking things up into units, into atomizing their experiences.

New geographies of time emerged. This was not immediate, and for the first century or two was communal, private citizens could rarely afford clocks, and watches were unknown before 1500. But clocks became smaller and more accurate, slowly making their way into homes, first of nobles, then of the bourgeoisie.  The minute, the hour, and the day were mapped not on the sun and the moon, but on the clock. As clocks increased in accuracy, minutes began to matter.

These changes coincided with the emergence of humanist notions of historical time and time periods. Religion and mythology had long constructed chronologies with different ages in them, but these were not historical time periods. Typically, all of history was one and continuous. The Renaissance began to see that there were discontinuities and that the ancient world and the modern world were not one seamless whole. Through the work of men like Bruni, the differences came to be understood and appreciated.

So it was not only the daily sense of time that was being altered in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It seems to me that the entire human sense of time was changing radically in those years. Likewise, I would argue that both clocks and the new understanding of history were creating a broader command of causality, one that would come to rely less-and-less on divine intervention. These were important changes in the mental processes of Renaissance Europeans.