Chapter 9 - Clocks

Summary

This chapter focuses on the literary debates provoked by the appearance of mechanical clocks – and “clockworks” more generally – in medieval England. Invented in China in the eighth century, the first European mechanical clocks were manufactured in the early fourteenth century. The contemporaneous literary record shows that clocks did not immediately impose a secular conception of time that regulated human life; instead, the population of medieval Christian Europe continued to reckon time through cycles of light and dark and according to the liturgical calendar. Drawing on readings of Christine de Pizan, Philippe de Mézières, Jean Froissart, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Lightsey argues that clocks were primarily received in the time of their invention as mechanical wonders, and primarily employed as displays of wealth.