The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries

By Matthew S. Champion

The Low Countries were at the heart of innovation in Europe in the fifteenth century. Throughout this period, the flourishing cultures of the Low Countries were also wrestling with time itself. The Fullness of Time explores that struggle, and the changing conceptions of temporality that it represented and embodied showing how they continue to influence historical narratives about the emergence of modernity today.
 
The Fullness of Time asks how the passage of time in the Low Countries was ordered by the rhythms of human action, from the musical life of a cathedral to the measurement of time by clocks and calendars, the work habits of a guildsman to the devotional practices of the laity and religious orders. Through a series of transdisciplinary case studies, it explores the multiple ways that objects, texts and music might themselves be said to engage with, imply, and unsettle time, shaping and forming the lives of the inhabitants of the fifteenth-century Low Countries. Champion reframes the ways historians have traditionally told the history of time, allowing us for the first time to understand the rich and varied interplay of temporalities in the period.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226514826

Book preview

THE FULLNESS OF TIME

THE FULLNESS OF TIME

Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries

MATTHEW S. CHAMPION

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017.

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51479-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51482-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226514826.001.0001

This book was published with the generous assistance of a Book Subvention Award from the Medieval Academy of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Champion, Matthew S., author.

Title: The fullness of time : temporalities of the fifteenth-century Low Countries / Matthew S. Champion.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017012884 | ISBN 9780226514796 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226514826 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Benelux countries—Civilization. | Time—Social aspects—Benelux countries. | Time perception—Social aspects—Benelux countries. | Time—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Civilization, Medieval. | Fifteenth century. | Benelux countries—History—To 1500.

Classification: LCC DH71 .C47 2017 DH180 | DDC 949.2/01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012884

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Miranda

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1.  The Polyphony of Civic Time in Fifteenth-Century Leuven

2.  The Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament: Making Time in Leuven’s St. Peter’s Church

3.  Music, Time, and Devotion: Emotional Narratives at the Cathedral of Cambrai

4.  The Advent of the Lamb: Unfolding History and Liturgy in Fifteenth-Century Ghent

5.  Calendars and Chronology: Temporal Devotion in Fifteenth-Century Leuven

6.  Time for the Fasciculus temporum: Time, Text, and Vision in Early Print Culture

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Plates

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

Examples

Plates

ABBREVIATIONS

AA: Archive of the Abbey of Averbode

AAP: Archive of the Abbey of Park, Heverlee

ARAL: Algemeen Rijksarchief, Leuven

AUL: Aberdeen University Library, Aberdeen

BL: British Library, London

BMP: Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris

BMR: Bibliothèque municipale, Rouen

BSB: Bäyerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

CCSL: Corpus Christianorum series Latina. Turnhout, 1953–.

CMM: Médiathèque municipale, Cambrai

CUL: University Library, Cambridge

GUB: Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ghent

ISTC: Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (British Library)

JGOC: Jean Gerson: Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Palemon Glorieux. 10 vols. Paris, 1960–1973.

KBR: Koninklijke Bibliotheek/Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels

ONB: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

PG: Patrologia cursus completus, series Graeca. Ed. Migne. 161 vols. Paris, 1857–1866.

PL: Patrologia cursus completus, series Latina. Ed. Migne. 221 vols. Paris, 1844–1865.

RLM: Rijksarchief Limburg, Maastricht

SAG: Stadsarchief, Ghent

SAL: Stadsarchief, Leuven

SBB: Staatsbibliothek, Berlin

ST: Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologiae. Ed. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 61 vols. London, 1964–1981.

VDG: Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. Ed. Joseph van den Gheyn. 12 vols. Brussels, 1901–1936.

Map. The Low Countries, c. 1450.

Introduction

Time is central to who we are and how we act. To spend time with time is to see how strict chronological divisions into successive instants or uncomplicated pasts, presents, and futures collapse when faced by time’s fullness. Images of time’s plenitude evoke the eschatological languages of fulfillment of prophecy that saturate the biblical tradition, and which were in turn taken up, transformed, and modulated into languages of time and eternity, old and new, in Pauline theology and early Christianity. Shaped by these interpretive traditions, wrestlings with time—the assertion of the new over the old, the lingering life of the old in the new, and the paradoxical implications of eternity in time—have formed prominent motifs in the history of Western cultures. This is the first sense in which this study grapples with a fullness of time. In a second sense, I appropriate the language of temporal fullness as an emblem for the rich variety and complexity of times in social life and cultural production—life full of time. The Fullness of Time is devoted to interweaving these two kinds of fullness, to interpreting some of the many voices that contributed to the polyphony of time in the fifteenth-century Low Countries.

Why the Low Countries and why the fifteenth century? In the stories we tell ourselves about the past, this period is often cast as either a time bathed in the autumnal haze of a waning Middle Ages, à la Johan Huizinga, or as a golden rebirth, a Renaissance, à la Jacob Burckhardt, where an expanding historical horizon now allowed Europe to reach back to drink from the revivifying wells of classical antiquity.¹ The fifteenth century here inhabits an uneasy space between the medieval and the modern, more precisely between the late medieval and the early modern (like an impolite dinner guest, the fifteenth century rarely arrives on time). In the schematizations of historians of time, the modern is generally characterized by precise secular time measurement and its clear sense of history happening in the foreign past. By contrast, the troublingly religious fifteenth-century Low Countries are often seen as embodying a disturbingly naive sense of time, where a kind of static or cyclical liturgical time colonizes the past, making it inhabit an eternal present. A weak sense of anachronism marks visual culture; the rulers of the Low Countries, the Dukes of Burgundy, with their lavish courts, magically wield power over time, making Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Jesus inhabit the same time frame; the polyphony of the region’s composers floats in an ethereal timelessness. Conversely, the rich cities of Northern Italy and the Low Countries have been seen as the site of new dynamics of time where precise mercantile practices effaced the older, vague ecclesiastical rhythms of time. This book attempts to imagine a different kind of historical space.

The Fullness of Time hopes to give some time back to the fifteenth-century Low Countries, uncovering, in precisely those places seen as most troublingly timeless in earlier scholarship, complex narrative unfoldings of affective time, subtle temporalizations of eternity, and dynamic cultures of historical and liturgical reflection. It seeks answers to two questions central to understanding time in the period. First, how was time experienced, perceived, measured, and produced in the fifteenth-century Low Countries? Second, in what ways did its prolific cultures of ritual, sound and music, text, and image structure and reflect these forms of temporality? Many of these temporal forms were shared across the centuries loosely categorized as medieval; others were new, or given new force by their use in new contexts. Nevertheless, the task of the book is not to give prizes for temporal novelty, but to uncover diverse textures of temporality in particular settings. Throughout, my desire is to assist broader reflections on how human cultures perceive and organize time.

Imagining spaces no longer defined by Burckhardtian or Huizingian readings of the period has become easier following the waning of Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (The Autumn of the Middle Ages, 1919).² Attracted to Huizinga’s pioneering interdisciplinary and anthropological method, historians, musicologists, and art historians have also substantially revised his vision of the splendid decay and empty ritual of the Burgundian state.³ Peter Arnade’s illuminating Realms of Ritual, for example, reframed Huizinga’s reading of Burgundian symbolic action as emptied of primary meaning, instead insisting on the centrality and meaningfulness of symbol and ritual in constructing the Burgundian city and state.⁴ A similar revision of Burgundy’s importance in a pan-European context has been undertaken by historians of art and material culture like Marina Belozerskaya and Paula Nuttall.⁵ Belozerskaya, for example, has challenged the prevalent perception of the fifteenth century [which] emphasizes humanistic antiquarianism and Italy, arguing that the pan-European appeal of the arts hailing from the Burgundian milieu is one of many alternative lenses through which the period can be viewed.⁶ More generally, recent scholars of the fifteenth century have stressed the period’s multiple options, a plethora of possibilities unleashed by reforming religious movements and new devotional styles, social changes associated with urban environments, and new political configurations.⁷

What were these new configurations? Across the period, successive Dukes of Burgundy amassed vast territories across modern-day France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, making the duchy one of the most important and influential powers of fifteenth-century Europe.⁸ Roughly coterminous with the Dukes’ northern holdings, the cultural unit of the fifteenth-century Low Countries extended from the northern Rhineland, including Cologne, to Holland and Guelders to the north, and in the south to flourishing urban centers of modern Northern France and Belgium—towns like Arras, Douai, the imperial cathedral city of Cambrai, the rebellious mercantile city of Ghent, Bruges, Leuven with its new university, Antwerp, and Brussels.⁹ Across the region, common cultural vocabularies emerged in religious houses, guilds, and confraternities, rich seed-beds for the growth of localized devotional cultures and a multiplicity of ritual and artistic practices. The fifteenth-century Burgundian Low Countries were the site of important changes in visual culture, led by artists such as Jan van Eyck (c. 1395–1441), Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1399–1464), and Dieric Bouts (c. 1415–1475), famous then, as now, for their technical and iconographical innovations. In music, composers like Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), Gilles Binchois (c. 1400–1460), and Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410–1497) transformed methods of composition across Europe. The history of the period was recorded by innovative chroniclers including Georges Chastelain (c. 1415–1474) and Olivier de la Marche (c. 1425–1502). In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the religious life of the Low Countries witnessed the startling reform movement of the devotio moderna and the rapidly expanding Windesheim Congregation of religious houses, with their scriptoria and schools.¹⁰ Within the houses of the devotio moderna, new and subtle forms of devout scrutiny of time were developed. Members of the flourishing Burgundian court fostered these changes, supporting powerful religious cults and houses, mingling with urban elites in guilds and confraternities, and acting as patrons of art, music, and literature.

Beyond the Burgundian lands, the splendors of the courts of Philip the Good (1396–1467) and Charles the Bold (1433–1477) traveled with artists, musicians, bankers, and tradesmen across Europe, giving rise to emulation in England, the courts of Northern Italy, and as far as Portuguese Madeira, where an image of St. James the Greater, possibly by Dieric Bouts, became venerated as a protection against plague.¹¹ Closer to home, the reforms of the sixteenth century are inconceivable without Desiderius Erasmus, trained at the University of Leuven and steeped in the culture of the devotio moderna. The influence of the devotio moderna stretched eastward too, shaping religious reform and transformation in central and eastern Europe.¹² Europe, in turn, came to the Low Countries. The Italian banker Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife, immortalized in Jan van Eyck’s famous 1434 portrait, were only two of many fifteenth-century Europeans who made their homes in the northern trading centers of Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp. Just as the sophisticated cities of Italy transformed Europe in the fifteenth century, so too did their northern counterparts. In the aftermath of Charles the Bold’s defeat and death at the Battle of Nancy in 1477, the Burgundian territories were fused with the Hapsburg Empire. Partly as a result, complex receptions of the cultures of the Low Countries continued across Europe and the world, especially in sixteenth-century Hapsburg Germany and Spain.

Seen in this light, a history of temporalities in the fifteenth-century Low Countries can offer new approaches to an important and transformative period and region, while providing scholars across disciplines with material for further thought about how time changed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Writing the History of Temporalities

But, to re-voice Augustine of Hippo’s (354–430) famous formulation:

what is time? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time.¹³

Like Augustine, I do not know what time is. But Augustine’s reflections can open up ways of thinking about time through our perception of its effects—the passing of events into the past, the sense of a future to come, an experience of the present—and through an often implicitly shared language. We may not know what time is, but we know that we speak about it, and that this speaking seems both a response to, and a way of making, our worlds.

I hope to respond to this sense of time’s doubleness—as given, as made—by allowing for the analysis of what Paul Ricoeur has called universal or cosmological and lived or human time.¹⁴ As in all cultures, in the fifteenth-century Low Countries, cosmological time was marked by the passing of day into night, the cycles of the seasons, and the movements of heavenly bodies. Lived time is impossible to disentangle from cosmological time, and can be described as the formation of temporalities through the habits and practices of human action. The ways that humans form their temporal experiences include every symbolic structure and act that shapes their worlds. Texts, music, art, architecture, ritual, and history: all structure time; and their arrangements of time are in turn structured by the understandings of time held, lived with, and used by their creators, performers, and audiences.

My initial desire to write a history of time in the fifteenth-century Low Countries developed from my reading of Augustine’s Confessions and De musica. I was struck by the insistent use of the Ambrosian hymn Deus creator omnium as an exemplum for human temporal experience, and more broadly for the temporal harmony of the universe.¹⁵ For Augustine, human perception and experience of time is made in the unfolding of language, and involves the stretching out of the soul (distentio animi) to encompass the past as memory, attention to the present, and expectation of the future.¹⁶ But time’s formation in language and text, for Augustine, is also musical, founded in the harmony, ratio, and numbers of the hymn, or the chanting of a psalm. These are, of course, liturgical texts, which create and measure time in the social act of the church’s liturgy. Drawing on Augustine’s method of understanding time, I wanted to take seriously the arrangement of time through text, music, and ritual.

In part, then, The Fullness of Time advocates for a kind of historical practice that takes transdisciplinarity seriously. For if we are born into the midst of time, and situated even before our birth within folds of narrative, those folds are also the clothing of our senses and our bodies, the pages of the books we read, the folding of sound waves into each other, the vibrations of our vocal folds as we talk and sing, the worlds we shape and inhabit.

Historians often think they belong to the discipline most devoted to the study of time, and there is, of course, a substantial literature on time and history including considerable work on medieval and early modern time.¹⁷ These histories are in their own ways diverse and complex—yet to my mind we do not yet have a sense of the possibilities of the history of temporalities to generate the kinds of explorations that have made the history of gender, the body, space, memory, emotions, or materiality open so many more windows onto past worlds over recent decades. In the tradition of integrative historical practice that engages across disciplinary boundaries, we are now ready to write histories of time that are full—that think carefully about the ways in which different cultural forms produce, reflect, and inhabit time.

I am making no claim to an absolute fullness of analysis here: no product of the human imagination could claim to achieve a synoptic vision of every temporality. Much of this book focuses on the temporalities experienced and generated within religious institutions, universities, court and urban elites. I have not been able to pursue in sufficient detail the textures of time for merchants, artisans, farmers, and laborers, or for the laity, literate and illiterate, although these often intersected with, and were shaped by, the kinds of time I interpret throughout the book. Gender, life stage, and intergenerational change all warrant further investigation, as do questions of social acceleration and rhythm.¹⁸ These and other large gaps and failures of analysis will, I hope, be taken by others as places for further reflection on the history of time.

My own reflections have drawn particularly on the rich literature on time that has developed in and around anthropology, sociology, and cultural history.¹⁹ Early engagements with time within this tradition stressed the relationship between the rhythms of action and the development of categories and measurement systems of time.²⁰ Such approaches tended to instantiate oppositions between imprecise, natural, and organic traditional time and a mechanized modern time that aspires to exact quantification.²¹ This schema forms part of historical genealogies of a disenchanted and secular modernity. Classic examples are Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905) and Ricardo J. Quinones’s The Renaissance Discovery of Time (1972). In such genealogies, the Reformation or the Renaissance is often seen as emancipating the West from a medieval Christian temporal regime, and witnessing the discovery of the world [and] the discovery of man.²² In Quinones’s argument, the Renaissance sees time becoming profoundly valuable, precisely measured, and an enemy to be battled by human ingenuity, marking a radical change from earlier, indifferent medieval attitudes to time.²³ An emphasis on precise measurement similarly emerged in Gustav Bilfinger’s pioneering history of the measurement of the hour, Die mittelalterlichen Horen und die modernen Stunden (1892). Bilfinger charts a move from an imprecise and wandering religious designation of the liturgical hours to a modern and precise secular reckoning of the hours, the fixed and mechanically measured hours of late medieval and Renaissance urban life.²⁴ More recent accounts, similarly interested in the genealogy of modern temporality and time measurement, are David S. Landes’s Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (1983) and Gehard Dohrn-van Rossum’s magisterial History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (1996), the best current survey of the history of time measurement.

A further influential example of this narrative is Reinhart Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft—Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (1979). Koselleck proposed that a change in the conceptualization of time had taken place in the sixteenth century, when a medieval horizon of expectation, which collapsed temporal distance into presence, gave way to a modern temporalization of history: the Renaissance becomes the site of the discovery of history.²⁵ Vergangene Zukunft draws heavily on an interpretation of Albrecht Altdorfer’s famous painting, the Alexanderschlacht (1528–1529). But by viewing the Alexanderschlacht as an emblem of a near-timeless medieval temporal episteme, Koselleck constructs a modern fantasy of a changeless medieval past.²⁶ This fantasy is unsustainable. Crucial for Altdorfer’s visual language, for example, were changes in representation of space and time instituted by the painters of the fifteenth-century Low Countries. As I show in The Fullness of Time, artworks by painters like Jan van Eyck and Dieric Bouts developed radically new and paradoxical deployments of spatial and temporal depth, constructing spaces for reflection on time and its effacement that reveal the thinness of Koselleck’s account.

Oppositions between an unmeasured medieval time and modern measured time often tacitly rely on a separation between traditional, mythic, and cyclical societies, often associated with static Greek or Eastern temporalities, and modern Western Judeo-Christian societies where time is seen as an arrow, historical, progressive, and precise.²⁷ Within anthropology, a powerful critique of these approaches was mounted by Johannes Fabian, who saw them enforcing the supremacy of a secular West over supposedly more primitive societies.²⁸ Simple schematizations of time have likewise been destabilized within phenomenology and philology. Paul Ricoeur’s monumental investigation Time and Narrative drew out the complex emplotments of time within Western literary and historical traditions, stressing the constantly narrativized experience of human time. Moves toward a less schematic history of time were, of course, well underway before Ricoeur: Eric Auerbach’s classic essay on figura, for example, had shown that temporal organization in the medieval world could not be reduced to simple cycles or straight lines.²⁹ Auerbach’s "figura is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical.³⁰ It turns out to be an attempt to accede to an extratemporal perspective on time and eternity: God’s perspective."³¹ These insights, that the form of temporal structures may relate to attempts to approximate divine knowledge, and that temporality may escape linearity and circularity, are crucial to understanding time in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. For linear time can be arranged vertically and horizontally, and can be imagined through spirals, vortices, serpentine or fragmented lines, to name only some common forms.³² And it is not only in the figura that one can trace attempts to see time from eternity. Both circular and straight lines of time can come to approximate divine vision. And what kind of eternity is involved in the divine gaze is a question that cannot be answered with a simple equation of eternity with timelessness. As this book traces various figurations of time, it will be necessary to remain alert to the potential reductiveness of schematic taxonomies and the possibilities of other metaphors of time, both as heuristic tools for the twenty-first-century historian and as hermeneutics of time in the fifteenth century.

Simplistic schematizations of time were undermined from another direction by research in the 1960s and 1970s stressing a multiplicity of social times. These studies broke down monolithic social categories of time into plural varieties of time within social groups.³³ Arguably the most influential studies of late medieval time, two essays by Jacques Le Goff collected and translated in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, proposed a gradual division between the church’s time and the time of the merchant linked to social and economic changes over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.³⁴ In many ways echoing Bilfinger, Le Goff saw the church’s hegemony over time, epitomized by church bells, gradually giving way to more precise measures of time in the mercantile world, signaled by the introduction of independent work bells. Le Goff laid particular emphasis on Northern France and Flanders in these changes, but applied his theses to the fifteenth century briefly and, often, only implicitly. The Fullness of Time aims to reappraise and refine Le Goff’s insights in relation to particular communities in the fifteenth-century Low Countries. In a striking passage that harmonizes with these aims, Le Goff made it clear that he saw his own work as only a starting place for more complex histories:

It is to be hoped that an exhaustive investigation will someday be made with the intention of showing in a particular historical society the interaction between objective structures and mental frameworks, between collective adventures and individual destinies, and between the various times within Time.³⁵

The current state of research echoes Le Goff’s desire in seeking to understand multiple and competing times at the level of the individual or small group as well as a social class or a whole society.³⁶ The experience of time is seen as involving multiple routines.³⁷ In a less well-known essay, Le Goff again provided a clear articulation of the need for, and the trend toward, histories of multiple and various attitudes to time:

The principal conceptual and methodological innovation in recent historical thought has been the replacement of a unitary, linear and objective, mathematically divisible conception of time by a multiple, bountiful, reversible, subjective concept much more qualitative than quantitative. The notion of time itself has often given way to the more malleable one of duration.³⁸

The appearance of duration (durée) here should give us pause for thought. It is a term most associated with the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Bergson contrasted the inner perception of time by human consciousness—durée—with an external scientific, homogeneous, and divisible time—temps.³⁹ Bergson’s theory of duration in some ways fits well with the critique of objectivity mounted in various guises across the twentieth century. It also bears a superficial resemblance to Augustine’s radical discovery of subjective time as the stretching out of the soul.⁴⁰ Here, in a reliance on individual subjective experiences of time, we can find one strong strand in a genealogy of viewing time from the perspective of a fluid and changing self.

It is this kind of radically destabilized view of time that Peter Burke identifies as occasionalism, that is, the possibility of the same people behav[ing] differently according to the occasion or situation.⁴¹ For Burke, future discussions of the cultural or social history of time are likely to place increasing emphasis on occasions.⁴² Examples of occasionalism include code switching in language, changes to handwriting in different situations, fluidity of religious affiliation, and, importantly, different temporalities in an individual life, in different domains such as work and leisure.⁴³ The city is one place where a multitude of domains with a variety of situations and social arrangements are likely, making possible this experience of shifting temporalities.⁴⁴ Burke’s method is attractive for a study of time within the prosperous, socially and economically diverse towns of the fifteenth-century Low Countries. But a slight hesitation is also necessary, prompted by the easy allegiance of an occasionalist reading with ideologies of the fluid self. As Burke argues, greater attention to occasions is a useful corrective to understandings of culture and the self that assume consistency and coherence across domains. But the fluid self is, like all selves, a cultural phenomenon (though its genealogy should not be confined simply to the modern). We need, therefore, to combine an insistence on occasionalism with attention to the forms of time by which certain selves might create or try to create coherence and bridge situational variation. Too great an emphasis on either flux or stasis will be inadequate when analyzing the varieties of time experienced in the fifteenth century.

Central to processes of change and continuity are the objects that humans encounter and create. By objects I wish to include the plethora of cultural products which, when seen, heard, tasted, touched, smelled, or read, shaped the experience of time for historical agents, both consciously and unconsciously. Formation of time within the contingent structures of culture is not to be confused with a constantly conscious awareness on the part of agents of patterns of temporal formation.⁴⁵ To reframe the observation: the practice of culture by agents includes the psychic or habitual foundations of culture, that is to say, how such patterns are formed consciously and unconsciously in the mind and through action. The ways in which, for example, texts can shape how a mind structures its experience can be both conscious and unconscious, as the work of the cultural psychologist Jerome Bruner has demonstrated.⁴⁶ Bruner reports how, when a reader is asked to retell a story from Joyce’s Dubliners, the reader’s discourse changes, including mirroring certain linguistic transformations in Joyce’s text that were absent from the reader’s earlier language use: the reader is resonating to . . . [the text’s] discourse.⁴⁷ This kind of insight into the capacity of texts to shape readers has profound implications for the history of time. For if we accept Augustine’s understanding of the intrication of textuality and time, we must think about the ways in which texts might be shaping and forming the temporal horizons of fifteenth-century readers.

These observations about text must be widened to embrace other media, including music and images. Time has been more prominent in scholarship on visual culture in the fifteenth-century Low Countries.⁴⁸ Pioneering work was undertaken by Alfred Acres in the 1990s through a case study of time in the work of Rogier van der Weyden.⁴⁹ Acres’s readings can be supplemented by trends in the history of art that have stressed the changing reception of works within their contemporary settings. For example, Beth Williamson has shown how images might be perceived differently depending on particular times within the liturgy, including the liturgical day and year.⁵⁰ In a suggestive recent study, Williamson has extended this analysis by bringing the visual more directly into dialogue with sound and music, in the process stressing the temporality of devotional practice.⁵¹ Such re-temporalization of sacred art, ritual, and music forms a significant part of this book.

A more radical reformulation of time’s relationships with Art has recently emerged in Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance (2010).⁵² This theorization of anachronic art with plural temporalities is immensely helpful in combating narrow readings of images and their temporalities. In many ways congenial to my argument, I find the work’s claims for Art and the artist—"only the idea of art can open up . . . the possibility of a conversation across time, a