Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe

Twenty years ago, I read After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (2001) by Jack Kornfield. The story was far from being memorable, but the idea behind it was remarkable: "Most spiritual accounts end with illumination or enlightenment. But what if we ask what happens after that? What happens when the Zen master returns home to spouse and children? What happens when the Christian mystic goes shopping?" (xiii–xiv). Yes. What happens when the medieval mystic comes back from the highest peaks of contemplation and meets his fellow monks at the refectory? What happens when the regular medieval Joe lives in a worldview in which time and eternity are intertwined? The answer hides in the pages of an anthology that Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland have compiled on medieval temporalities. Readers discover the relationship between the time of grace and the ordinary chronological temporality in the mystical literature associated with the late medieval Dominican convent of Engelthal in Bavaria and Dorothea of Montau, a married woman struggling with multiple temporalities. But the anthology covers other topics related to temporalities, including how liturgy activates the sacramental mediation between temporalities, the materiality of time, and the relationship between temporality and narrative.The growing scholarly interest in the categories of temporality and historicity in the field of historical studies is well known. The interest was ignited mainly by the writings of Reinhard Koselleck and François Hartog, who work at the intersection of disciplines like history, historiography, and philosophy of history. Temporality is the experience of time; historicity refers to the ability of social actors or of a given community to inscribe their experience of time into one history. Historicity is not explicitly addressed in the volume, although the readers may recognize its presence in sentences like this one: "Past, present, and future are categories which writers and artists of the period use as points of reference in order to conceive temporalities while at the same time problematising this chronological temporal scheme" (10). The sentence actually stands for inscribing an experience of time into one history. Suerbaum, Sutherland, and their colleagues do not cover directly these theoretical concerns; however, some reference to the current historiographic debate on temporality can be found in both the introductory essay and in a couple of contributions. I will return to this.The book is divided into four sections. The first section focuses on multiple temporalities. The concept refers to multilayered temporality that can be perceived either as a disorder or a constitutive complexity. In the first chapter, which is a review of the thirteenth-century text Vita Aedwardi regis, Katharine Sykers skilfully plays with temporal modes such as chronos (the flux of time), kairos (the moment of opportunity and decision), and aevum (the perpetual time of saints) to describe the sense of an inevitable end. This section also hosts a chapter by Philippa Byrne on eschatological time and another essay by Benjamin Thompson on heavenly eternity. The second section investigates the relationship between temporality and narrative. One chapter is dedicated to a comparative analysis of three sonnets by Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch in terms of the different temporalities. The authors, Manuele Gragnolati and Francesca Southerden, demonstrate how temporality is differently framed in the three texts. Another two chapters complete this section: one, written by David Bowe, deals with the thirteenth-century Tuscan poet Guittone d'Arezzo and conflicting temporalities; the other, authored by Almut Suerbaum, is centered on the convergence of human and divine time.The third section investigates the mystical and liturgical time. In his chapter, Jonas Hermann discusses the spiritual gifts and visions of God recorded in the late medieval Dominican convent of Engelthal in Bavaria, a center of mystical literature. The author is interested in linking these experiences with temporality and time. The other two chapters in this section are by Annie Sutherland on a thirteenth-century English meditation on the perfection of Christ understood in the context of the medieval theories of time and by C. M. MacRobert, who discusses the use of non–past perfect tense. Finally, the fourth section is dedicated to the materiality of time. The two chapters in this section reflect on the life and revelations of Gertrude of Helfta, also known as Gertrude the Great, and the monochrome Passion cycle of San Nicolò del Boschetto, a group of fourteen large painted cloths. In the first chapter, written by Racha Kirakosian, the attention is on the conceptions of time and temporality approached through the lens of material culture. In the second chapter, Jim Harris considers the temporal function of those painted cloths within Cassinese Benedictine soteriology.The compilation of essays covers a variety of themes and subjects with a certain preference for those of the High Middle Ages. The contributors are medievalists and literary scholars with an interest in the Middle Ages, and the volume is supplied with a series of illustrations that supports the last two chapters of the book.In their introduction, Suerbaum and Sutherland rightly note that a distinction exists between tempus and temporalitas: one is the subject's experience of time and the other is the ontological time (5). And they also rightly argue that there is a "fundamental difference of perspective between the 'time of the universe' and 'the time of our lives' (or 'physical time and historical time'), and it is the latter that is the concern of this anthology" (6). Finally, they are also correct to claim that temporality is a real experience even if the objective time cannot be adequately defined (5). In this regard, this reviewer has two brief comments to offer. The first is that I am unsure that all the contributions fall perfectly under this categorization; in some cases, the categories of time and of temporalities seem to overlap or collapse into each other. The book would have benefited from a more disciplined approach. The second comment is a complement of the previous one: the patristic and medieval theories of time that contributed to build the assumptions about time in the medieval era are sometime recognized but not always applied by the contributors who approach the past on its own terms.I hope that these comments in no way distract the readers from the immense treasury hidden in this anthology. It is a cogent, ample, and at times profound engagement with temporality, a hot topic in scholarship these days. The volume is recommended to historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars and is not necessarily restricted to those interested in the Middle Ages but will also appeal to those interested more generally in time and temporality. I can see this book being a resource for graduate students as well.