Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 6 (2017), pp. 9-13 
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-20386

ISSN 2279-7149 (online)
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
2017 Firenze University Press

Editorial
In this issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies, we explore the different 
ways in which time was culturally constructed in the early modern period. 
How was time experienced, conceptualized and organized? What were the 
temporal practices that structured early modern lives, either individually 
or collectively? How did one measure time and acknowledge its effects on 
people, and what were the cultural imaginaries, sensory settings or discursive 
frames through which time became lived reality? Time could be experienced 
as an embodied aspect of human existence, but was also represented and 
mediated in various ways. In this journal issue, we are looking for the ways 
in which people managed and conceptualized both time and temporality 
and incorporated them into their understanding of the specific cultural 
context(s) in which they lived.

The idea that time is culturally constructed has its own history, of 
course, and so has the interest in exploring its development. Peter Burke has 
traced these developments and suggests that the most significant turning 
point may have occurred around 1900, with the social theory of Émile 
Durkheim and his circle, later followed by the Annales historians.

The basic binary opposition underlying these studies was the one between self and 
other, presented as a contrast between traditional and modern, between what Febvre 
called le temps vécu and le temps-mesuré. Time in traditional societies, according 
to the model used by these scholars, is qualitative, concrete, local, imprecise, or 
in a word, organic. Time in modern societies, on the other hand, is quantitative, 
abstract, uniform, and exact, as mechanical as the clocks and watches used to 
measure it … Traditional time is the time of experience, organized and measured 
by tasks, especially agricultural tasks … Modern time, by contrast, according to 
these scholars, was exact time, measured by the clock, a sense of time appropriate 
to commercial and industrial societies, with a different work rhythm from pastoral 
or agricultural communities. (2004, 619-620)

Burke comments on this opposition being in need of qualification, by no-
ticing both the reciprocal implications between the two sorts of time, and 
an increasing awareness of the multiplicity of forms of time reckoning that 
can already be recorded in the experience of early modern people (see al-
so Gurvitch 1963). We hope that the present collection of essays can bring 
more food for thought in the same direction. If the powerful turn from or-
ganic and task-oriented time towards measured and mechanical time took 
place in the early modern period, we need to think about how these changes 
were understood by the early modern people themselves. In order to do this, 



alessandro arcangeli, anu korhonen10 

we provide case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, dis-
cussing in different ways how the two views of time were in fact intertwined 
with one another, and indeed with various everyday practices that allowed 
early modern people to develop both complex and personal understanding 
and experience of temporality. 

Anthropological research on the cultural relativity of time experiences 
has exercised a major influence on the most recent generation of historical 
studies, and displayed a characteristic attention for the way objects shape 
temporality (Birth 2012). Consequently, the growing field of material culture 
studies represents the framework within which a significant amount of work 
on temporality has found and is likely to find place and encouragement in the 
foreseeable future (Appadurai 1986; Harvey 2009; Gerritsen and Riello 2015). 
Linked with an interest in the material culture of time is its close connection 
with technology: time has been both measured and understood by means 
of various technological tools, the innovation of which has also introduced 
changes in experiencing time. Whether portable watches or pendulum clocks, 
early modern innovations in the technology of time marked a modernisation 
process that gave rise to temporal management as an ever more powerful 
vehicle of control and discipline. 

But the early modern period also saw new vocabularies develop for 
discussing experiences related to time, bringing with them new forms of 
affect. For some people, time was secularized, but for others, it grew even 
more intensely religious, demanding an enhanced personal investment in 
temporal management. Time was also gendered, particularly if we look at it 
from the perspective of everyday life. 

There is also, inevitably and intriguingly, a reflexive, meta-historical 
dimension in any consideration of time: history as a discipline is practised in 
a given time set, and applies to culturally specific past time frames and flows 
(on periodization within a pragmatic reflection on doing history, see Jordanova 
2006, 105-125). No wonder then that historians, like literary scholars and 
anthropologists, have increasingly seized upon time as a subject that is not 
only constitutive of historical subjectivities but also a foundational ingredient 
of the disciplines themselves (Hunt 2008, 16-24). 

JEMS is, programmatically, an interdisciplinary humanities journal. 
It is therefore noteworthy, and yet entirely in line with the publication 
agenda, that Donatella Pallotti and Paola Pugliatti have kindly invited two 
cultural historians to guest edit this year’s issue. We accepted their invitation 
with enthusiasm. The International Society for Cultural History (ISCH – 
incidentally, the environment within which the two of us met, began and have 
continued to collaborate) had chosen for its 2015 yearly conference, which was 
held in Bucharest, the topic of ‘Time and Culture’. It was a natural choice, 
therefore, for us, to invite some of the conference speakers, who both for 
the chronology and methodology of their research were consistent with the 



editorial 11 

horizon of our interests, to develop their conference papers into contributions 
for the present volume.1 Consequently, five of the articles that follow (Ashcroft, 
Bourdon, Kaartinen, Korhonen, and Ylivuori) are the result of a re-elaboration 
of texts first presented before audiences in Bucharest. Another (Eriksen) had 
been planned for the conference but could not be delivered, because in the end 
the panel for which it had been intended did not materialize. Cope’s article 
has been written especially for this journal issue. Arcangeli’s was first delivered 
as a plenary lecture at the 2016 yearly conference of the Italian Association 
of Shakespearean and Early Modern Studies (IASEMS), which was held in 
Catania. As is always the case, feedback from their respective audiences, as 
well as from the anonymous referees who generously volunteered to review 
the present collection, greatly helped the texts to reach the form in which 
they are now offered to the reader.

Given that cultural history intrinsically eschews definition and 
standardization, it will not come as a surprise if the contents of the present 
issue present the reader with a variety of research objects and approaches. 

Material culture, and the way in which the design, manufacturing and 
uses of objects expressed and channelled time experiences and perceptions, 
a dimension which we have reviewed among the most characteristic and 
promising recent developments of research in the field, is represented in Sophie 
Cope’s essay. The ‘things’ whose social life she investigates are gifts exchanged 
on the occasion of the New Year in early modern England – dated objects 
that may both reflect and have encouraged the perception of that cyclical 
moment as significant in people’s lives, and represent a symbolically charged 
material component of the shared celebration of the ritual year.

History writing (therefore, in a sense, fragments towards a history 
of historiography) is the object of two distinct analyses, which differ for 
the chronology, geography and genre of the texts examined. In the first, 
Étienne Bourdon explores a variety of genres of Renaissance history writing 
in order to investigate the multiplicity of temporal conceptions which 
they express. While some continuity of the Christian reading of time as a 
divine order is clearly perceivable, historical narratives testify to a relative 
secularization of time, witnessing the emergence of the notion of heritage 
and an increasing focus on the present. In the other essay, Anne Eriksen 
proposes a close cross-examination of two textbook collections of historical 
exempla from early modern Scandinavia. The principle of historia as magistra 
vitae is still dominating to such an extent that the narratives are not ordered 
chronologically, but rather in the form of a lexicon of virtues that the pupils 
are expected to learn from the knowledge of the past.

1 A wider selection of papers from the same conference is going to be published in 
Lung et al.



alessandro arcangeli, anu korhonen12 

Other forms of cultural practice are the focus of the remaining 
contributions. Anu Korhonen challenges the received idea that early modern 
time keeping was vague and primarily task-oriented, in particular among 
women, and finds a variety of contexts and ways in which sixteenth- and 
seventeenth-century English women already adopted clock-time as a matter 
of fact, both in their experience and conceptualizing, albeit (still) mixing it 
with the circadian rhythm and an understanding of task-oriented temporality.

Time management is at stake in Soile Ylivuori’s contribution. With focus 
on an individual and her ego documents, we are here invited to appreciate 
the highly specific context in which an eighteenth-century Englishwoman, 
whose life circle was strictly dependent on the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
adopted a painstakingly accurate monitoring of her own daily activity. This 
consisted of an exercise of self-discipline which, however, the author does not 
imagine as devoid of autonomous agency and self-satisfaction.

With Marjo Kaartinen we explore ennui – therefore also making 
a contribution to the growing field of study of the affective life of past 
generations. By means of a systematic search of the available literature via 
a digital resource, the author revisits the precise timing and contexts of the 
English borrowing of the French word, and finds a strong correlation of its 
usage with social rank and lifestyles, while a surprisingly limited role seems 
to be played in the story by gender.

Rachel Ashcroft analyses the writings of Giordano Bruno and Michel 
de Montaigne from the perspective of their understanding of time, as a 
complex dimension in which the human mind and body interplay, and finds 
a significant correspondence between their two approaches.

Finally, reading is the cultural practice considered by Alessandro 
Arcangeli from two different, complementary perspectives: the time 
conditions in which the act of reading was practiced in a period of the early 
modern era affected by the introduction of the printing press and much else, 
but also the time experience readers may have had while absorbed in their 
texts, according to genre and other conditions. 

As this brief summary may already suggest, some of the themes and 
dimensions of the historical analysis of temporality as cultural history has 
developed it can be seen applied in practice in the eight contributions, which 
could also be read transversally as exemplifying fields, in which given research 
categories and tools can be fruitfully adopted. Gender is central in Korhonen 
and Ylivuori, while also being considered by Arcangeli and Kaartinen; class 
or social hierarchy are meaningful in Cope, Eriksen, Korhonen and Ylivuori. 
Emotions are relevant for Ashcroft, Eriksen, Kaartinen and Korhonen. 
Korhonen and Ylivuori share as well an emphasis on clocks and clock-time, 
duration, time-keeping and time management. Temporality figures among 
the concepts used and areas explored by Bourdon, Eriksen, Kaartinen and 
Korhonen. Arcangeli and Bourdon speak, to various extents, of historicity; 



editorial 13 

Arcangeli, Bourdon and Korhonen, also, of rhythms. Calendars are discussed 
by Ashcroft, Bourdon and Cope; and chronology by Bourdon and Eriksen.

Undoubtedly, the topic we have chosen would allow many more 
enquiries, and there was no attempt, in assembling the present collection, to 
be systematic in any respect. Nevertheless, we hope that we are offering to 
the reader interesting enough topics and approaches; as well, perhaps, as some 
encouragement to pursue further investigation of still uncharted territories.

Alessandro Arcangeli and Anu Korhonen

Works Cited

Appadurai Arjun, ed. (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commmodities in Cultural 
Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Birth K.K. (2012), Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, New York, 
Palgrave Macmillan.

Burke Peter (2004), ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Viator 35, 617-626.
Gerritsen Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds (2015), Writing Material Culture History, 

London, Bloomsbury.
Gurvitch Georges (1964 [1958]), The Spectrum of Social Time, trans. by M. 

Korenbaum and P. Bosserman, Dordrecht, D. Reidel.
Harvey Karen, ed. (2009), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to 

Approaching Alternative Sources, London-New York, Routledge.
Hunt Lynn (2008), Measuring Time, Making History, Budapest, Central European 

University Press.
Jordanova Ludmilla (2006 [2000]), History in Practice, London, Hodder Arnold. 
Lung Ecaterina et al., eds (forthcoming), Time and Culture/Temps et Culture, Selected 

papers presented at the International Society for Cultural History (ISCH), 
Conference organized in September 2015 at the University of Bucharest, 
Bucharest, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti.