"Modern temporal sensibility" can search for itself in pursuit of diverse thorny issues, but the results may not be history. In his comprehensive Introduction, Chris Humphrey questions the "imagery of circularity" and asks why "our experience of temporality should be like this at all." But of the eight essays in this collection, written in 1999, several tell linear stories, that is, they explicate evidence within its historical context with respect for chronology of events, while others just seem to go round and round.
Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, "Year-dates in the early middle ages," explores and explains a wealth of dating conventions for years of reference not only to the birth of Abraham and ab urbe condita Romae but also by reference to regnal, consular, and indiction years. Anni mundi reckoned from the beginning of time (creation) are mentioned only briefly, but not in their several alternate counts according to veritas Hebraica, veritas Septuaginta, or later from the Biblia vulgata. Each of those systems made sense in their times and particular contexts, but difficulties arise when we try to place them in the system of anni domini created by Dionysius Exiguus and Beda venerabilis. It is that long series of years ab incarnatione anni, upon which historical accounts depend today, and we have to ascertain those uncertain dates within the common era (as some orthodox Jews prefer to say). The author explains these systems very well, but for an explanation of anni domini, one should turn now to Georges Declercq, Anno Domini. The Origins of the Christian Era (Turnhout, 2000) which appeared after these essays were completed.
In a marvelous study of thirteenth-century legal documents, Paul Brand discusses "Lawyers' time in England in the later middle ages." It seems that the clerks had their own conventions which were impenetrable to all but their justices, clerks, and barristers. The courts met during the law terms of Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, and Trinity but with many variations from the appointed days. Every document was dated to one of those terms, usually to its first session, but not to the actual "day in court." There were "return days," "excluded days," and "adjournments" which raise the question whether real time and real days were completely absent for lawyers. Distinctions between "time of peace" and "time of war" could vary the judgements not only on trespass, robbery, and homicide but even on interpretation of property deeds. Differences of application of law tempore regis made it necessary to specify the reign for seisin enjoyed by a claimant or by a defendant, and there were limitation periods for performance of services to be enforced. While such details may seem to be peculiar to a distant time and place, courts of every country and culture had such systems and do so today. The schedules and adjustments and holidays must be mastered if you want to keep up with what really happens.
Equally precise and useful for historians is Mary Carruthers, "Meditations on the 'Historical Present' and 'Collective Memory' in Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Many scholars have offered to reinterpret a work of medieval literature by distinguishing grammatical tenses used in particular narrative texts. Carruthers clarifies the frustrations of some of those interpretations by demonstrating that the problem is more with us than with them. "Modern literary convention, not nature, decreed that tenses must be temporally sequenced, thereby prohibiting tense switching in Latin composition." Our literary requirement of tense consistency does not account for the human mind, for which "the present is the basic tense of narrative." Much of the tense switching in medieval texts may be understood without difficulty if it is kept in mind that "the present is the tense of thought, and of all human cognitive activity, not only of narrative." Her discussion of the cognitive situation is enhanced by an excellent discussion of past, present, and future in Augustine's Confessions XI.17; see further the recent essays by Richard Corradini, Zeit und Text. Studien zum tempus- Begriff des Augustinus (Vienna, 1997), and W.M. Stevens, "A present sense of things past. Quid est enim tempus?" Keynote Address for the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, July 2000, ed. Gerhard Jaritz (2002).
Another fine contribution is by Robert A. Markus, "Living within sight of the end," who explains the diversity and even clash of ideas for Christians in late antiquity and the early middle ages. For all of them, there was a sense of fulfillment which was often expressed in language of Apocalypse, and some new Christians seemed to look forward to the Great Assize, perhaps within their own "times" or at least in their own "time images." However, the author puts such language into historical context as it occurred, and he demonstrates how little anxiety was actually generated by those few and exceptional preachings. Most Christians seem to have been less excitable and more "down-to-earth"; they ploughed and planted, raised children, built and bought houses, and continued to invest in land, shops, and business ventures. Markus makes it clear how the recent millennial speculations by Richard Landes owe more to modern ideas than to historical evidence.
Howard Williams reviews many reports of graves opened or unopened at Sutton Hoo. He wants to know how people in tenth and eleventh century England imagined death, but in language of "commemorative and public performances for creating social memory." This allows him to throw "the parades of Hitler's National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany and the Christian Liturgical calendar" in the same pot, and he mostly discusses what has not been found in his period or what scholars in other fields have said more recently and generally about psycho-social reactions to death and its celebration. The essays by Chris Humphrey, Ad Putter, and Peter Burke also seek broad schemes of thought about "Urban culture," "Sir Cleges ," and "The sense of anachronism." In each of these meditations, mountains of evidence are related, "new" perspectives put forward, and the grand theories of other writers discussed. In terms of the perspectives thus asserted, particular passages of literature may be reinterpreted, but this reader cannot be so sure that anything has been achieved by such circular explorations. These three authors may not forgive the reviewer for suggesting that little of the medieval world may be understood by obscuring its linear time-sequences, simultaneities, and historical contexts in the service of modern mentalites.