Time and the Early Modern:
Measurement, Experience, Signification
Mure Room, Merton College, 21 April 2009
Funded by the English Faculty and the John Fell OUP
Research Fund
Programme
9.05 welcome: David Norbrook
9.15-9.45
Penelope J. Corfield: ‘The Hollowing Concepts of Modernity and Early Modernity’
9.45-11 Time across cultures
Timothy Brook: ‘Dragon sightings: chronologies of Chinese time that don’t correspond to our own’
Rosalind O’Hanlon: ‘'Landscapes in time: modes of historical consciousness in early modern India’
Michael Edwards: ‘Both metaphysics and measurement: time in the early modern philosophy of the
schools’
11-11.15 coffee
11.15-12.30 Temporalities and the material history of texts
Chair: Wes Williams
Sarah Ng: ‘Issues of periodization of Chinese calligraphy in Early Modern China’
Giles Bergel: ‘Timelines and lifelines: genealogy, chronology and tradition in The Wandering Jew's
Chronicle 1634-c.1830’
Kary Kelly: ‘Popular Calendars in Printed Primers and Almanacs in Early Modern England, c.1520 –
1570’
12.30-1.30 lunch (Hall)
1.30-2 Fundraising forum: (Hawkins Room)
2-3.40 Time and Narrative
Chair: Jonathan Thacker
Martin Kemp: ‘Leonardo and time in narrative painting’
Laurie Maguire: ‘Time and Beauty: The Case of Helen of Troy’
Claire Waters: ‘“The naturall course of declining”: female old age and late Elizabethan drama’
Rebecca Bullard: ‘Delarivier Manley, Tory Prophet’
3.40-4 coffee
4-5.15 Time and the Reformation
Chair: Sharon Achinstein
Luc Borot: ‘The Case for a Really Holy England: Robert Parsons, SJ, and Foxe’s Calendar of Protestant
Saints’
Rhodri Lewis: ‘A “brave argument against Scripture Scoffers and Prae-Adamites”? Matthew Hale and
William Petty on Demography and the Age of the Earth’
Jeffrey Miller: ‘Figures, Types, and the Changing Language of Foreshadowed Time; or, What We Talk
About When We Talk About Typology’
5.15-c.5.45 Local time, global time: open forum, led by David Norbrook
Concluding remarks: Sally Shuttleworth, Head of the Humanities Division
5.45-6.45 Reception (Savile Room)
Our thanks to the Bodleian Library for images from Petrarch, ‘Trionfo del Tempo’, MS. Canon. Ital. 62,
Milton, ‘On Time’, MS. Ashmole 36-7.
Abstracts
Giles Bergel: ‘Timelines and lifelines: genealogy, chronology and tradition in The Wandering
Jew's Chronicle 1634-c.1830’
This paper will explore issues of time in the Wandering Jew's Chronicle, a ballad published in England
between 1634 and c.1830 that embedded the genealogies of the throne of England within various legal,
legendary and scientific chronologies. Consisting of a core text by the Royalist 'ballad-monger' Martin
Parker together with anonymous continuations and variations, it is an acknowledged exception to the
'decline of the chronicle' dated by Daniel Woolf to the early seventeenth century. The paper will show the
text's progressive accumulation of chronological layers throughout its life, in which the reformed
chronology of the 'historical revolution' was added to its oral and iconographic sequencing of English
history. A further timeline may be inferred from a publishing history that traces developments in
copyright and the English ballad trade; typographical and other shifts in the materiality of printed texts;
and the editing of traditional ballads from the heyday of the broadside and chapbook through to the
ballad-collections of the Romantic period. The paper will discuss the text's place within English
chronological culture and demonstrate some methods of visualising its development over time.
Dr Giles Bergel is JPR Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early-Modern Printed Book at Merton
College. His research interests are: history of the book; textual scholarship; historiography. Areas of
particular interest to him include cheap print, such as ballads, chapbooks, newspapers and ephemera, and
interactions between print and scribal and oral cultures. His current research is on the representation of
genealogy in print and other media during the handpress period (c. 1450-1800) in Britain. He is also
working on a study of chapbooks from the eighteenth century to the present. His publications include
'William Dicey and the Networks and Places of Print Culture', in John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong
(eds.), Worlds of Print: Diversity in the Book Trade (British Library/Oak Knoll Press, 2006).
Luc Borot: ‘The Case for a Really Holy England: Robert Parsons, SJ, and Foxe’s Calendar of
Protestant Saints
In his Treatise of the three Conversions of England, Robert Parsons, SJ, challenges the Protestant vision
of Britain’s religious history illustrated by John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. He does so by narration, but
more interestingly by comparing the Tridentine breviary’s sanctoral with Foxe’s calendar of Protestant
saints. By doing so, he draws a connection between the historiographic and the mythographic on the one
hand, and the organisation of collective celebration on the other.
By selecting exceptional figures for a cycle of celebration to impose a communal rhythm on
social life, a certain community selects highlights in its collective history whose succession generates a
narrative. This paper is concerned with the way the cyclical and the linear interact, and with the
theological and ideological aspects of this particular controversy.
Luc Borot is Director of the Maison Française d'Oxford and Professor of Early-Modern British Studies
at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III. In general terms, he works on the cultural and intellectual
history of the British Isles, 1580-1660. His most recent publications are on the Levellers (Richard
Overton) the early Quakers and doctoral dissertation and his main publications are on Thomas Hobbes,
James Harrington, and English Catholic mystics of the 17th century. Work in progress: the literary culture
of Thomas Hobbes; a translation of Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.
Timothy Brook: “Dragon sightings: chronologies of Chinese time that don’t correspond to our
own”
The official dynastic history that each Chinese dynasty commissioned of its predecessor devotes roughly
a quarter of its space to chronologies of significant events. The core chronologies, which relate events at
court by reign, are followed by chronologies of unusual natural events, also by reign. These range from
astronomical phenomena to the natural disasters of flood, drought, and epidemic. Combined, these
chronologies constitute the warp of dynastic time, across which the actions of individuals were woven as
the weft.
In the course of using the official histories to reconstruct an ecological chronology of the Yuan and Ming
dynasties (1279-1368), I have come across several chronologies of dragon sightings. The dragon is of
course an iconographic representation of imperial power, but these sightings are not formulaic paeans to
the emperor. Understood as having taken place in real time, they constitute part of the official
chronology of the dynasty. They also earned the notice of contemporary historians. Should historians
attend to these sightings? Do we read them analogically? What place might they have in our
reconstruction of Chinese chronology?
Timothy Brook is Shaw Professor of Chinese. His research interests include: Social and cultural history of
Ming China; Law and punishment in imperial China; Collaboration during Japan's wartime occupation of
China, 1937-45; War crimes trials in Asia. His publications include Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth
Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London: Profile, 2008).
Rebecca Bullard: ‘Delarivier Manley, Tory Prophet’
Mark Knights has recently identified the motif of decay over time as an intrinsic element of earlyeighteenth century Tory historiography – a counter to the Whig narratives of progress found in many
histories published after the Revolution of 1688. This paper explores the motif of decay over time in
Delarivier Manley’s two scandalous romans à clef, The New Atalantis (1709) and Memoirs of Europe
(1710). In both works, Manley uses the relationship between narrative time and chronological time to
suggest that Whig depravity has been a constant threat to the English constitution throughout the later
Stuart period. But she also incorporates elements of prophecy into her narrative in order to suggest the
possibility of an imminent escape from political -- and temporal -- stasis. Her innovative reworking of
contemporary historical sources and her manipulation of intricate time schemes within her own
narratives makes these texts unusually sophisticated early eighteenth-century examples not only of
political satire but also of partisan historiography.
Dr Rebecca Bullard is Junior Research Fellow in English, Merton College. Her research interests centre
upon the literary culture of the early modern period and eighteenth century, with a particular focus on
literature and politics, historiography and fiction, the early novel, women’s writing and the history of the
book. Her first book, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674-1725: Secret History Narratives, is due to be
published by Pickering and Chatto in 2009. This monograph is a detailed study of the literary and party
political characteristics of secret history – a form of polemical, revisionist historiography that flourished
in later Stuart England. Her future research plans include work on early modern women and the history
of the book, miscellanies, and hymns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Penelope J.Corfield, ‘The Hollowing Concepts of Modernity and Early Modernity’
This paper assesses the later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century origins of the concept of Modernity
within an unfolding Grand Narrative of British History. It looks further at the broadening of ‘Modernity’
into a paradigm of Enlightenment progress, which has then been applied (and roundly criticised) as a
stereotypical model of progressive change world-wide. As the concept has spread in range and
application, it has become less and less satisfactory as an overall category, as has happened also to
‘Capitalism’. Hence the advent of sub-categories. The genesis of the concept of Early Modernity is traced,
as used pioneeringly by historians such as John Elliott. But the embroidering of the concept has not
resolved the core problems. The paper concludes by arguing that both ‘Modernity’ and ‘Early Modernity’
are becoming hollow concepts, which have outlived their heuristic usefulness. As a result, the new quest
should be for alternatives - and a different way forward is proposed.
Penelope J. Corfield is Professor of History, Royal Holloway and a Visiting Fellow of All Souls. She has
two linked sets of research interests. One focuses upon the social, cultural, and urban history of Britain
from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She is currently planning a new project entitled 'The
Long March of Meritocracy'. The other research interest focuses upon History as a subject of study,
which is defined as Historiology (what are the concepts and approaches inherent to the study of history?)
in contrast to Historiography, which is concerned with History-writing (who wrote what, when, and
why?). Her publications include Time and the Shape of History (Yale University Press, 2007).
Michael Edwards: ‘Both metaphysics and measurement: time in the early modern philosophy of
the schools’
The idea that time was a particularly spiny and complex problem originated with Augustine, but it
became a philosophical commonplace in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One reason for this
anxiety and uncertainty was the variety of possible approaches to the phenomenon of time. Time could
be a question for students of metaphysics, natural philosophy, chronology, grammar and many other
subjects. In an intellectual culture still strongly shaped by the traditional university disciplines, time was a
question that crossed disciplines in complicated ways.
My paper explores some of the consequences of these varied approaches to time in the philosophy of the
schools - the scholastic, Aristotelian tradition derided, but yet carefully read, by Hobbes and Descartes. In
particular, I focus on the implications of treating time as a problem split between disciplines- as
simultaneously the subject of metaphysics, and as a quantity to be measured, for example. I end with
some reflections on the consequence of attempts by philosophers such as Hobbes to simplify this
complexity, making time primarily into a problem in natural philosophy.
Dr Michael Edwards is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. His research
interests are in early modern intellectual history and the history of science, and in particular the scholastic
and Aristotelian traditions and their relationship to the 'new philosophy' of Hobbes and Descartes.
Recent publications include:
'Digressing with Aristotle: Hieronymus Dandinus' De corpore animato (1610) and the Expansion of late
Aristotelian Philosophy', Early Science and Medicine 13 (2), (2008), 127-170.
'Aristotelianism, Descartes and Hobbes', Historical Journal 50 (2) (2007), 449-464.
Kary Kelly: ‘Popular Printed Calendars in English Primers and Almanacs, c.1520 – 1570’
England’s best-selling printed genres of the first and second halves of the sixteenth century were primers
and almanacs, respectively. The content of the devotionally-oriented primers and the secular, scientific
almanacs differed tremendously, but they shared a prominent feature: both started with a calendar. This
paper will analyse the similarities in the form and content of primer and almanac calendars, and consider
how far they point to the emergence of a popular printed calendar. The paper will argue that primer and
almanac calendars evolved to reflect the broad range of contemporary influences on the annual cycle, and
demonstrate that these calendars accommodated and assimilated Reformation changes to the liturgical
calendar without disrupting fundamental approaches to the organization of time.
Kary Kelly received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford in January 2008. Her dissertation
was on ‘The Organization of Time in Reformation England: The impact of religious change on the
printed calendar and patterns of daily prayer, c. 1520-1570’, and her research interests include popular
religion in Reformation England, sixteenth century calendar reform, and diurnal domestic devotion.
Martin Kemp: ‘Leonardo and time in narrative painting’
New concepts of perspectival space in the Renaissance brought in their train new issues in the
representation of time. These issues crystalised in Leonardo da Vinci's practice in a particular way, given
his notions of space at a "continuous quantity", and an instant in time as a "point" of no dimension. His
Last Supper is conventionally described as depicting the "moment" when Christ announces his
forthcoming betrayal, but this is a gross simplification. Rather, he is creating what I will be calling a
"synthetic moment". This effectively became the norm for all subsequent "history painting".
Martin Kemp is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art. He has written and broadcast extensively on
imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day. Leonardo da Vinci has been at the
centre of this endeavour, and has been the subject of a number of his books and exhibitions, including
Leonardo (Oxford University Press 2004). His wider research has involved the sciences of optics,
anatomy and natural history in various key episodes in the history of naturalism. In 1989 he published
The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (Yale University Press).
Rhodri Lewis: "A 'brave argument against Scripture Scoffers and Prae-Adamites'? Matthew
Hale and William Petty on Demography and the Age of the Earth".
In his Primitive Origination of Mankind (1677), Matthew Hale cited the political anatomist William Petty in
support of his views on the monogenetic creation of humankind, c. 4000 BCE. At first, Petty encouraged
such uses of his work, but he later came to realise that his demographic theories could not easily be
squared with the Biblical record. I will argue that Petty's changing views of the subject are emblematic of
the decline that overcame Biblical chronology in the later seventeenth century.
Dr Rhodri Lewis is University Lecturer in English and a Fellow of St Hugh's College. His Language,
Mind and Nature was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and his next book, William Petty
on the Order of Nature is forthcoming from Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in late 2009.
He is currently involved in two editorial projects: volume 5 of the Oxford Francis Bacon (comprising
the De sapientia veterum and Bacon's early philosophical writings), and the correspondence of John
Aubrey. He is also at work on a monograph considering the rise of the ‘man of letters’ in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
Laurie Maguire: ‘Time and Beauty: The Case of Helen of Troy’
Professor Laurie Maguire is a Fellow of Magdalen College and the author of many publications on
Shakespeare and early modern literature (see http://www.lauriemaguire.net/). She was awarded a
Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to complete her new book, Helen of Troy: From Homer
to Hollywood (forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell).
Jeffrey Miller: ‘Figures, Types, and the Changing Language of Foreshadowed Time; or, What
We Talk About When We Talk About Typology’
The end of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth saw a huge influx of
typological words in English: “foreshadow,” “typical,” “antitype,” “typify”, to name only some. My
paper will begin by considering this phenomenon in relation to the first vernacular translations of two of
the early modern period’s most influential works of Reformed theology, and of Reformed typology:
Calvin’s landmark Institutio Christianae Religionis (first French trans. in 1560; first English trans. in
1561) and Ursinus’s extensive and internationally popular commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism (first
English trans. in 1587; new and revised English trans. in 1601). Comparing Calvin’s Latin usage of
typology’s two key terms – “figura” and “typus”, or “figure” and “type” – with Ursinus’s, and with the
often varying word choices made by their vernacular translators, I will trace the shifting language of early
modern typology and explore what it may tell us about the heightened stakes of interpreting time and
history typologically during the period, and of using certain words when doing so in writing.
Ultimately, my paper will build towards tabling a series of interdisciplinary questions for further
thought, including: How might the evolution of word choice in vernacular translations illuminate, and
perhaps even have shaped, crucial historical, theological, political, and literary developments? And what
role might the “occasional” dynamic of writing itself have played in the generation (as opposed to merely
the expression) of thought and belief?
Jeff Miller is a second-year D.Phil. student at Magdalen College, working under the supervision of Dr.
Will Poole. Jeff’s doctoral thesis is on Milton, theological typology, and the ways that the event of writing
could transform thought and belief. He co-convenes the Early Modern Graduate Forum with Thomas
Roebuck (all, as ever, welcome!) and has also recently presented papers on Thomas Gataker and the
unintentional endorsement of heresy, and on the way that Thomas Young, Lancelot Andrewes, and
James Ussher may have been the primary sources of Milton’s Independency.
Sarah Ng: ‘Issues of periodization of Chinese calligraphy in Early modern China’
Chinese calligraphers have a tendency to classify styles of calligraphy by dynasties since ancient times. By
definition, such classification usually proceeds according to chronology and political-dynasty. According
to Meyer Schapiro, historical classification is an instrument with grouping and divisions which not only
bring out more clearly the significant similarities and differences, but also permit people to see a line of
development. Hence, it is the reason why period styles have been applied as a way to study Chinese
calligraphy. Despite its traditional convention, it is useful to convey to the people a sense of how one
artistic development leads to another. That is, how, for example, the calligraphers evaluate their times of
styles of calligraphy in terms of aesthetic ideals in order to create a periodization more responsive to the
social realities of the day.
However, this stylistic analysis in terms of political dynasty sometimes is defective and over generalized.
For some dynasties which are longer than the others (e.g. Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) vs. Qing dynasty
(1644-1911)), does it mean that the aesthetic taste keeps the same over hundreds year? Why it is more
common to comment styles of calligraphy according to dynasties than individual calligraphers, especially
in early modern China?
In the West, it was common for critics to apply literary term to art or vice versa, such as Heinrich
Wolfflin. In China, it was comparatively less common but still happened. For instance, Taigeti was a term
used to describe a type of literary style in Ming China. Then, this term was used in a style in Ming
calligraphy. Apart from period styles, there are period terms in calligraphy as well. For the same style of
calligraphy, there are different period terms, such as Taigeti in the Ming dynasty and Guanggeti in the
Qing dynasty.
For the phenomena described above, there must be some reasons leading to these happened. What are
they? Is the periodization in calligraphy culturally inclusive and decisive? If calligraphy is a work of art, is
aesthetic element in distinguishing styles influential? This paper will argue, a set of key terms signals the
discourse which are based on a wide range of sources. Important texts by late Ming critics newly
translated here show how originality was advocated in judging artistic merit. In the process of showing
this, I will mention briefly some insufficiencies and incoherencies regarding the definition and time span
of some of the period styles and terms currently employed in the history of Chinese calligraphy, after
which an alternative to period styles and terms will be proposed. This study offers a new approach to
interpreting the styles of calligraphy in early modern China.
Sarah Ng is a graduate student in History of Art
Rosalind O’Hanlon: ‘Landscapes in time: modes of historical consciousness in early modern
India’
Rosalind O’Hanlon is Professor in Indian History and Culture. Her research interests include: Social and
intellectual history of India; Histories of caste in India; Histories of empire, gender and the body; Social
and religious history of Maharashtra. Current projects include: Caste and the making of Brahman
identities in early modern Maharashtra; The history of penance and purification in India; Oxford Early
Modern South Asia Project.
Claire Waters: ‘“The naturall course of declining”: female old age and late Elizabethan drama’
The experience of time as lived across the lifespan – the ageing process – is a growing field of research in
early modern English literature. The question of old age and the physical decay attendant upon the
passage of time was particularly pertinent in the later years of Queen Elizabeth I’s England. This paper
will consider the work carried out by ageing women on the late sixteenth century stage, considering ideas
of the presence and absence of female senescence in readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dekker’s Old
Fortunatus. A focus on the years preceding the death of the ageing Elizabeth will allow for the
incorporation of ideas of witchcraft, sexuality and power, millenarianism and the dissemination of
mechanised clock-time in a paper which will test ideas of performance of and response to female ageing
in early modern England and today.
Claire Waters is in her first year of DPhil research in the Faculty of English under the supervision of Dr.
Emma Smith. Her work considers representations and performances of ageing in the drama of late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth century England, with a strong interest in images and interpretations of
the female ageing experience. Forthcoming articles include ‘The Tempest’s Sycorax as Blew-Eye’d Hag: A
Note Towards a Reassessment’ (Notes and Queries, 2009) and, emerging from a secondary interest in
Renaissance bibliography and censorship, ‘Monuments of Veritie: Considering the Irish Holdings of
Holinshed’s (1587) Chronicles’ (Irish University Review, June 2009).
Some reading arising from the papers:
Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, trans. Ralph Mannheim, in Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European
Literature (New York, 1959; repr. Minneapolis and Manchester, 1984).
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800 (Ithaca, 1979).
Rachel Doggett et al., Time: The Greatest Innovator : Timekeeping and Time Consciousness in Early
Modern Europe (Washington DC, 1986).
Gerhard Dohn-van Rossum, History of the Hour (Chicago, 1996).
Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers (New Haven, 2007).
Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from
Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976).
Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 13001800 (Oxford, 2009)
Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, II: Historical
Chronology, (Oxford, 1993).
Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.,` 1972).
Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago and
London, 1996).
Daniel Woolf, 'Genre into Artifact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the Sixteenth Century',
Sixteenth Century, 19:3 (1988), 321-354.