In many ways, we don't think much about time in modern society. Time is all around us. We wear wristwatches. We have clocks on our cell phones, on our desks, in the corner of the computer screen. Even the home microwave shows the time. Our walls are littered with calendars. We use monthly planners, yearly planners, daily planners. We take it for granted that we know what time and day it is.
Such was not the case in the Middle Ages.
Before the end of the thirteenth century, the mechanical clock did not exist in Europe. Sundials, water clocks (which might freeze in the winter), or sand hourglasses were used to approximate the passage of the hours. All of these had serious drawbacks, but detailed timekeeping was not really necessary. Monastic timekeeping divided the day into "hours" spaced about 3 hours apart: matins (midnight), lauds (dawn), prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers (evening), and compline (bedtime). This helped regulate the day by setting these 8 times for prayer and chants. The day was thus much more loosely regulated than our day which we measure by the minute on our digital clocks.
For most people, the year was also generally not measured by the passing of days, but rather by church festivals, agricultural seasons, and changes in the sky. Yet calendars as a source of information were always important to churchmen who needed to know the day in order to know which saint should be venerated. Manuscript calendars list every day of the month by the Roman dating system, which involved the ides and nones of the month rather than using the days of the week (Monday to Sunday) as we use them. This allowed one written calendar to be used every year rather than having to write out a new one each year like we do with our wall calendars. In these calendars, the occupations of the months and the signs of the zodiac often appear.
This does not mean however that people were unaware of time. As this exhibit will show, images of time played an important role in religious and secular spaces.