"The Left Bank looks rather different on this spring afternoon seven and a half centuries ago than it does in modern times - the pavement replaced with mud and plank streets, the bicycles with horses, the tabacs with booksellers' stalls, the tourists with hooded figures in academic robes, and the smells of frying crepes and auto exhaust with horse manure, woodsmoke, and unwashed bodies."
"A university statute specifies that elections would last while a candle burned, specifically a candle of "one pound of wax above a candle-holder of a weight of eight new silver coins... divided in 26 parts, each of which shall be an eighth of a Parisian yard." As Aristotle said in his Physics, knowing time was possible because of observations of changing things - in this case, lacking any sort of mechanical clock, the burning of a candle was the time given for the assembly."
Imagine students on Paris's Left Bank in the late thirteenth century, where streets are mud and plank, horses replace bicycles, booksellers' stalls replace tabacs, and smells include horse manure and woodsmoke. Notre Dame's bells marked liturgical hours such as none, signaling the middle of the afternoon and prompting movement to lectures. University statutes timed events by the burning of specified candles with precise weights and measures for holders. Aristotle's Physics framed time as known through observable change, so the absence of mechanical clocks made candles and bell-ringing practical timekeepers. Liturgical hours were seasonal, dividing daylight and darkness each into twelve parts, so hour lengths varied over the year.
Read at Medievalists.net
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]