University Place  Lisa Cooper Calendars in Medieval Life and Literature  June 24 UP890  cc >> Let me introduce to you, and it is my great pleasure to do so, Lisa Cooper. Lisa Cooper works on medieval literature, from the 12th to the 15th century. Her particular interests include the residences of labor, technology and material culture in both canonical texts like those by Chaucer, and in less known works. She's the author of "Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England," published 2011 by Cambridge University Press. She's the co-editor of two essay collections on medieval literature and material culture. She is currently working on her second book, "A Study of the Intersection of the Poetic and the Practical in the Later Middle Ages." Would you join me in welcoming my colleague Lisa Cooper, please? [applause]  "Winter is coming." These ponderous words are the motto of House Stark, one of the central families competing for power in the realm of Westeros in the ongoing HBO television series, speaking of suspense, Game of Thrones. It is itself based on the not yet complete, speaking also of suspense like our previous speaker, the not yet complete series of fantasy novels by the Author George R.R. Martin, known collectively as A Song of Ice and Fire. Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with this show, which I recommend highly. But I don't think you need to be familiar with it to feel the chill, literal as well as figurative, of "Winter is coming." The Starks live in the north of a land, which is depicted here on the left, the geographically as well as culturally bears a strong resemblance to medieval England, depicted here on the right in this 13th century image. In fact, the Stark's stronghold, Winterfell, lies just south of a wall that divided the-- There is it, up there, circled in red. 

It divided the supposedly civilized world of men from the realm of the rebellious people known as Wildlings, as well as from the White Walkers, or terrifying snow zombies in the far reaches of the north. There's the leader up of the snow zombies. Some of you are thinking, I'm never going to watch this show. This wall in Westeros, as the author, George Martin has explained, was inspired by the real wall built in the north of England. Now I have circled it on the map. It was built in the north of England as a defensive structure by the Romans starting in 122 AD and named for the emperor Hadrian. For medieval Englishmen, beyond Hadrian's Wall danger, in the form of the Scots, was known to lie. The fictional Starks and the noble company of the Night's Watch, the men who guard the Wall, always with a capital W, from incursions by those who live beyond it, frequently remind each other that while life is pleasant now, and to be honest, if you know the show, it's never really all that pleasant, it will not always be so. A time of darkness, of cold, of snow, of bitter hardship and far worse is inevitable. "Winter is coming," conveys the Starks' attitude about themselves, their faith in their family's hardiness and ferocity, their ability to, like winter, overcome whatever they touch. 

Of course it also works kind of like the Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared," always be prepared. At the same time, however, "winter is coming" speaks to their collective uncertainty about what the future holds, other than that it will be bad. And most crucially, their uncertainty as to when that future will be. So whereas our previous speaker was talking about who done it or how they done it, here we have the question of, when will it be done? Time in Westeros moves like our time, in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, centuries. But the seasons do not. As one commentator notes, "For the unlucky inhabitants of Westeros's seven kingdoms, a unique feature of their world is it's extreme seasonal variability. Summers and winters have an indeterminate length, leaving it's citizens wondering how long the current season will last and how long they may have to endure the next one." Though frankly, when I read that I thought, that just sounds like living in Wisconsin. [laughter] When the novels and the TV series begin, the current summer in Westeros has lasted for almost a decade. Winters past, we learn, have lasted as long as a full generation. Fans, I mean scholars of the Game of Thrones, have pondered whether there is a scientific explanation for this phenomenon, offering up possibilities that include a wobbly planetary tilt and an extremely elongated orbit. 

But what George Martin is invoking with the uncertainty of Westeros's seasons and the ominous vagueness of the Stark motto is, I think, not a scientific phenomenon, but rather a cultural one. It contributes importantly to the very central medievalism that is the medieval ambiance of the series. It recalls in a compact, but I think therefore all the more effective way, medieval culture's own obsession with, and uncertainty about, the nature of time and how it can best be kept. That is, not just understood, but also measured by the human beings carried along in it's inestimable stream. Across the Middle Ages, broadly speaking, a period running from circa 500 AD, Anno Domini, something I'll reference again, to circa 1500 or so, depending on whom you ask. The science of time was both philosophical, what is temporality? And it was practical, how do we keep track of it? I'll be touching on a bit of both in the rest of this talk because, as you will see, and I think we all sort of know, it's really quite impossible to fully separate the two. As the church father Augustine put it most famously in his confessions, his spiritual autobiography from the end of the fourth century. It ends beautifully with a meditation on time and memory. "Quid est enim tempus?" What then is time? Then he continues, and it's one of my favorite lines in all of medieval literature, "Provided that no one asks me, I know." [laughter] Augustine's is a deeply metaphysical conundrum and over the course of his discussion he ties himself up into ever tighter philosophical knots. At one point he even exclaims, "My condition is not good if I do not even know what it is that I do not know." In a move that has fascinated philosophers of language and time alike, Augustine finds a partial answer in narrative. 

He discusses how time works by meditating on the act of reciting a Psalm that he already knows. Here's what he says about it, "The life of this act of mine," that is the act of reciting the Psalm, "is stretched in two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present by that the future is transferred to become the past." And for Augustine, and this lovely passage goes on at some length, this process provides a partial explanation not just of how language works and how memory works and how time works, but also what human life is broadly. It ultimately becomes the way he, to some extent, consoles himself for, as he puts it, being "scattered in times whose order I do not understand." He wishes, above all, for rest outside of time in God's eternal Sabbath. That, as he writes, "has no evening and has no ending." Because of course, the creator of time is not himself in time. But making an order out of the scattered time of human life here on Earth was the goal of every timekeeping scheme and device. medieval culture understood itself to be stretched out between time's bookends. Creation on the one hand, and Doomsday, the day of judgement, on the other. For medieval Christians that timeline had been split in two by the birth of Christ, producing what one scholar has called, a strained time scheme, one of fulfillment and yet also of unrealized hope and waiting. Although it had yet to arrive, medieval Christians were instructed to live their lives as if the moment when Christ would return and separate forever the saved from the damned was ever at hand. 

A lesson they took, in part, from the gospel of Mark. "Heaven and earth shall pass away. But of that day or hour, no man knows. Take you heed, watch and pray. For you know not when the time is." This connects interestingly, I think, to our previous speaker. Also, you can hear here, I think, how the Stark motto, "winter is coming," operates as a kind of revisiting of this apocalyptic language. In case anyone needed reminding, the coming judgement, the unknown and yet paradoxically fully known future, was made emphatically visible above the portal or on the wall of almost every church, from the grandest cathedral to the most humble chapel. And this tympanum above the door comes from southeastern France.  At this same time, however, written annuls and chronicles kept in countless manuscripts like this one from Scotland marking the passage of years. Each entry here begins with the words, Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord. 

The AD system was invented in the year 524 by a man named Dionysius the Small. We have many chronicles like this that track the passing of time. Chronicles like these tended not so much to focus on the coming of a certain day of judgement. Rather, they focused on life here on Earth. They made particular reference to political events, like the birth, crowning and death of lords, as here above. I have two images there. Here above is a chronicle of the kings of England. They also made reference to the weather, like this picture below of a bad storm at sea, in a Chronicle from Worcester, England. Although, this storm, to be honest, is actually taking place in a king's bad dream.  There was no way to know with any certainty the number of years allotted to any individual life. 

But the concept of the Ages of Man, shown here in an early 14th century manuscript in the shape of a wheel, attempted to divide that life and it's pasttimes into definite segments. It starts here, at the red circle with the infant with it's mother. And it continues, rather depressingly, all around the circle to the coffin at the bottom of the image. The Ages of Man were often based on the words of Psalm 9010, "The days of our years are three score and ten." That would be 70. That's a little depressing. But they could also be connected to the four changing seasons, the seven phases of the moon, the 12 months of the year, among other variations. There isn't just one set number of Ages of Man. There are actually quite a number of them. The day itself could be divided by way of a series of different mechanisms. First, by what are known as the Monastic Hours. 

That is, the seven segments of the monastic day, each marked by a particular set of prescribed prayers that would shift according to the liturgical, that is church or religious, calendar. They would shift according to liturgical season. For example, Christmas and Easter, on which more in a moment. Cities, and even small villages, also had bells that marked the beginning and end of the work day, as well as its mid-point. Even as the mechanical clock, shown here in a gorgeous manuscript image, although many real medieval clocks have survived. This is from about the year 1450. It's actually showing the Clock of Wisdom, but we won't worry about that for the moment. The mechanical clock was also coming into use in the Middle Ages and one story that used to be told was that the mechanical clock, by the end of the Middle Ages, had replaced all other ways of telling time. In fact, that's not true. All of these different ways of timekeeping, and others, were in use throughout much of the late Middle Ages, and one never really fully replaced the other. 

That actually continues through the early modern period and beyond. The zodiac, in a tradition going back at least to Babylon, provided yet another way of keeping track of time, but also using it in a different practical way. By that I don't mean checking your horoscope, although in fact, knowing your horoscope is a very big part of things in medieval thought about personality and destiny. I, instead, am thinking of this. These are two medieval versions of a figure known as zodiac man. Images like these are often found in medical as well as astrological manuscripts. Often the two genres of medicine and astrology combine in the same manuscript. Different signs of the zodiac were thought to rule over different areas of the body. You don't want to bleed one part of the body in the wrong month for that part of the body. So as you can see here, Pisces rules over the feet. 

That's the best time. If you're bleeding someone, which was a very common medical practice actually coming back into vogue now in medical practice today, if you bleed someone in the wrong month that's not so good. Here, just for fun, are a few more zodiac men, predominately from the later 14th and 15th centuries which is when they are most prevalent. In addition to the menagerie effect, which I just love, one thing that's really fascinating to me about these is that the way that they map time, or at least time as it signified by these symbols that in turn represent constellations, that in fact by the Middle Ages, were already wrong, upon the human body.  Another way of denoting the passage of time was through the scheme known as the Labors of the Months, the tasks traditionally assigned to different seasons of the year. This is a tradition that goes back to late antiquity. As in these images, which come from one of the most well-known manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The zodiac, which you see at the top of each of these pages, and the labors of the months, which is what you see in the bottom of the image, frequently appear together in what are known as Books of Hours. These are prayer books that allowed predominantly wealthy lay people, that is non-religious, to say their prayer on the same timetable as that used by the monastery with its monastic hours. Though in fact, we know from evidence that mostly people used them in the morning and when they went to church. 

They didn't actually, all day long, stop and say their prayers. But speaking of wealthy, the images in this calendar which was produced for the Duke of Burgundy in 15th century France, include images of aristocratic labor. You can see that in the first image on the left, and then skip one and you'd go to the next. That kind of labor, giving gifts, going on processions. You see this along side of more prosaic work, like this one on the right, being performed by peasants on the duke's estate. Many other sightly more common labors of the month images, like this one from a printed book of the late 15th century, stick almost entirely to manual labor, usually agricultural, of one sort or another. Here, I don't know how well you can see this, but manual agricultural labor is happening in this second ring. You can actually see the signs of the zodiac as well mapped upon that.  The very first part of a Book of Hours, as here in a Book of Hours made for Isabella the First of Spain. That would be Isabella of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

It was virtually always a calendar. Whether is was illustrated with the labors of the month and the zodiac or not. This one is. Of course, it was made for a queen so it's very lavishly illustrated. This is the calendar page for August and you see, not Leo which I am, but Virgo in the top right corner, and you see the labor of threshing happening down at the bottom. Whether calendars were illustrated with the zodiac and laborers or not, and most calendars were in fact unillustrated, the calendar in a Book of Hours always listed all the days of the year and the name of the saint to which each day was devoted. The most important saints' days are listed in red very often, which gives rise to our phrase, red letter day. The way that the rest of this calendar page is laid out is really complicated. I'm going to skip it for now. I would be happy to try to explain it to you during questions. 

In my current research I'm most interested in thinking about the kind of time marked by this kind of calendar. As one manuscript scholar has put it, "In books of hours the calendar is that part concerned with the here and now, the visible world."  The word calendar is closely associated with counting. It comes from the Latin, kalendea, which is the word for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar. That comes, itself, from the word calere, to call. In the Roman period, the first of the month was when the interest on debts came due. The more things change, the more they stay the same. [laughter] Thus we get the Latin word, calendarium, which doesn't mean calendar as you might expect if you just saw it, but actually, account book. In England by the 15th century, the word calendar in English, and also in French in fact, could mean the year itself, divided into its months, a table or chart corresponding to those divisions. So our current usage today. And then, by extension, a table of contents, a mathematical table or an astronomical one, and by further extension, a guide, a model, a reminder, and even a warning. 

We'll see this word come up again a little bit later in my talk. In short, as a system of accounting for time that blends the numerical with the seasonal, the calendar, in all of its many versions, was absolutely everywhere in medieval culture. As I'm going to make more clear in just a moment, it also became a staple of literary making, a more or less obvious presence in prose and verse ranging from the purely practical to the soaringly spiritual.  The two-- This is a deliberately blank slide for the moment. The two, that is, the practical and the spiritual, combined most crucially in the question of how to find Easter, the central ritual of the Christian church. Now I'm sure most of you have needed to check, for one reason or another, when Easter is taking place in any given year, whether you are a Christian or not. That's because Easter is what is known as a movable feast. Its date is determined by the date of the Jewish Passover. That's because the gospels tell us that Jesus was crucified after traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate that Jewish festival. The Jewish calendar, as some of you or maybe all of you know, is a lunar one. 

That is to say that it is based on the phases of the moon rather than on the solar calendar used by the Romans. In the Jewish calendar, Passover is to be celebrated on the 14th day of the first month of the Jewish year, but the start date of that first date of that first month depends on the moon. The moon's cycle varies more than that of the sun. So in fact, the lunar year is about 11 days and six hours shorter than the solar year by which we keep our calendars. Our calendar, as we all know, also varies thanks to leap years introduced into the Western calendar by Julius Caesar. Speaking of the moon,I don't know how many of you know this, but in a very fitting event for my talk today, yesterday was the Super Moon. I don't know how many of you got to see the Super Moon. The moon was closer yesterday to the Earth than it will be for the rest of the year, and closer than it has been since March, I think, of 1993. There will be another Super Moon in July, and the biggest Super Moon that we've had in many centuries will be in the year 2052, I learned. Hopefully, we'll all be around for that. 

Anyway, for the Christian theologians who first worked on firmly establishing the date of Easter in the third and fourth centuries it was absolutely crucial to distinguish Easter from Passover. The two could not overlap. Thus, in a nutshell, in a much fought over formula worked out in the fourth century, and that still applies today unless you are a member of the Greek Orthodox church, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after the vernal equinox. If that sounds like it would be complicated to figure out on your own, think about what it must have been like in the days before computer programs and above all, Google. [laughter] Easter, 2013, then you find out. How do you make sure, as a crucial way of unifying your relatively new religion, that everyone celebrates the holiest of days at the same time? The answer to this question in the Middle Ages, and actually even today, is the scientific genre known as the computus, as per the title, a word that has the same root as our word computer and comes from the Latin, computare, meaning, to count up. Computus refers both to the method used for calculating Easter, and to any text on that subject. At first such texts were things that looked like this, tables and charts and diagrams produced by very learned man, bishops and their scholarly subordinates. They would produce these for fixed periods of time, usually a hundred years of more, and then distribute them throughout the Christian world. Then everybody knows, at least for the next 100-some years, when Easter is going to be. 

After that the next guy needs to figure it out. Now learning how the computus worked took up eight full days of medieval Oxford University's astronomy syllabus. I am not even going to try to take you through it now. To be honest, as a humanist who really doesn't do this kind of math very often, really not ever, I'm not even sure that I fully could. That said, by the late 14th and 15th centuries, instruction on how to figure it out for yourself was available even to the lay person, especially if you had a book of hours at hand, as in this poem. This I'm going to read in Modern English. "In March, after the first C," that is, the weekly letter assigned to the day of the week in a medieval calendar, "Look for the prime," which here means the new moon, "wherever he be." And this is just for the rhyme here. "The third Sunday full --," well I know, "Easter day truly it is, And if the prime on the Sunday be, Reckon that Sunday for one of the three." [laughter] Okay, well, to translate, take the first new moon after the seventh of March. Because the seventh of March will always be labeled with the letter C in a medieval calendar. I can talk more about that in questions. 

And the third Sunday after that is Easter day. Count any Sunday that has a new moon as one of those three Sundays that you are counting up. This does not actually work for leap years. Yet this is a poem that survives in 17 different manuscripts, 15 of which include calendars. My larger point about the computus, which is a science that ultimately inflected almost every area of medieval life, is that counting days and months and years was a deeply engrained mental habit with spiritual, epistemological, that it ways of knowing, and even ontological, whys of being, ramifications. How do you know when you are, or when you will be next? This is no idle question given that in the 14th century there were at least four different ways of calculating when each day began, sunrise, sunset, midnight, noon. It is perhaps no surprise that we find calendars taking the form of pneumonic poems. Like the middle English poem from the 15th century still with us today that begins, "30 days hath November, April, June and September." I wonder how many times we each have recited that to ourselves trying to remember how many days are in a particular month. Well, this folksy verse has its counterpart in some of the greatest literature of the age, much of which is marked by cylindrical accountings for itself. One superb example is Dante's Divine Comedy. 

Sorry that picture is so small. It was finished in 1321. There's Dante. This is actually on the wall of the cathedral of Florence which you can see just to the right behind Dante's head. There's Dante holding his finished comedy. The poet/narrator tells us that his journey to Hell, and ultimately, up to Paradise began, [speaking Latin] That is, in the middle of our life's path. Speaking of the ages of man. But astronomical references in the poem inform its readers that, in fact, the journey begins on Good Friday of Easter week in 1300 and ends on Easter Sunday. Similarly, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, begun probably in the late 1380s, is well known for its numerous time-keeping and well as calendrical references. Perhaps the most famous of all is the opening of the poem itself. 

I very much hope you were all made to memorize these first 18 lines as UW English majors. But in case you have forgotten them, here they are. Beginning of course with, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote." I'm not going to read all of it for reasons of time, but just so that you have it in front of you. We can see here that what Chaucer does is locate his readers in time in multiple ways. I've highlighted those in white. We have April with its sweet showers, and we have the -- March as well, so the names of the months. We have the agricultural season. Spring with its rain, we have the drought of March, the sweet showers of April, the new flowers, the new crops. We have the zodiac because the "yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne." The sun is halfway through the sign of Aries in the heavens. And we also have the liturgical, that is religious, calendar. 

"Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages." It is the time of pilgrimage, especially if you live in England, to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Well, things get even more precise as the tales proceed. After the first four tales have been told the host, Harry Bailey, and here I am going to read the middle English, but you have the translation right on the right there. Harry Bailey "saugh well that the brighte sonne The ark of his artificial day hath ronne The ferthe part, and half an houre and moore, And though he were not depe ystert in loore, He wiste it was the eightetethe day Of Aprill, that is messager to May." Okay, well, the very fact that the host is not very learned is belied by the next line which take things to yet another degree of timekeeping, because the host also "saugh wel that the shadwe of every tree Was in lengthe the same quantitee That was the body erect that caused it. And therefore by the shadwe he took his wit That Phebus, which that shoon so clere and brighte, Degrees was fyve and fourty clombe on highte, And for that day, as in that latitude, It was ten of the clokke, he gan conclude." Okay, this is time telling in three different ways at once. By the height of the sun, that's the first quotation that I read. By the length of shadows, and by the zodiac. Scholars have pointed out that we're told that the host is not very learned, but you actually couldn't do this without several instruments to hand and some charts and some tables. When you remember the Canterbury Tales you probably remember something, if you remember anything at all, about farting and naughty people moving beds around in the dark of night, right? But in fact, the Canterbury Tales, and in fact all of Chaucer's work, constitute a massive encyclopedia of medieval practical, and especially scientific, knowledge. Some of you may know that Chaucer even wrote an astronomical work called The Astrolabe which is an instructional manual on how to use that particular device that was imported into Europe from Islamic culture. 

He dedicated that text to his ten year old son, Louis. It's actually a very important moment for the history of writing science in English as well, rather than, say, in Latin. He says to his son, you're only ten years old. You've told me you have very little Latin, and so here is the book you can use to work your astrolabe, my ten year old child. Louis probably wanted an XBox instead. [laughter] But he got an astrolabe. In this passage from the opening of the Man of Law's Tale, Chaucer makes some really extreme technical demands on his readers. He poses an interpretive challenge that not all of them would have been able to meet, and that even fewer scholars of Chaucer's work have mastered. Fascinatingly, one such scholar, Peter Travis, has pointed out that all three moments like this in the Canterbury Tales. There are three of them that are just this complicated. 

They have something a little bit wrong with their calculations. All three are just a little bit off. For example, if we are to believe the technicalities with which we are presented at the start of the very last tale, by the parson, then the pilgrimage to Canterbury ends on April 17th, one day before it began on April 18th. Folks have suggested some reasons for that, one of which is that in 1394 April 17th was Good Friday, so Chaucer didn't care. It just would have been better for the pilgrimage to end in Canterbury or right before Canterbury on Good Friday before the Easter festival. This kind of error appears in the poem, Peter Travis argues, not because Chaucer didn't know his chronological and astronomical science. There is no question that he did. We even know which almanac he precisely consulted. But rather, because Chaucer was deeply interested in the ways his own cultural moment was itself so invested in the science of time. Chaucer's interest, Travis, I think rightly, suggests, is epistemological. 

What does it mean to know scientifically what the right time really is? What does it mean to locate yourself in time by any mechanism? I think Travis is exactly right, for as I'm going to suggest in a moment by looking at another one of Chaucer's poems, the medieval literary calendar is not just a scientific, but an emotional one. Before I turn back to Chaucer, let me give you an example of what I mean by way of another literary highlight from 14th century England, the anonymous poem known as Sir Gowain and the Green Knight. In that work, and here I would disagree with my colleague Caroline Levine. I would say there's actually a great deal of suspense in this poem. In that poem, which some of you may have read, Gowain of Arthur's court has made a deal with a scary green man. Here's a picture from the one and only surviving manuscript of that poem. This scary man whose head he cut off during the Christmas feast at Arthur's court. He, Gowain, must appear at the Green Knight's chapel on the first day of the next new year and allow the Green Knight to take a swing, in turn, at his head. To depict the year that separates the Green Knight's departure from Arthur's court, his talking head under his arm. Here you can the Green Knight holding out his head. 

From this moment the poet needs to give us a year, but very compressed, between the moment that the Green Knight departs and the moment when Gowain will set out on his journey to the Green chapel. The poet give us a passage that depicts in a gorgeous and almost 40 line long description, the turning of the seasons. That description, which I unfortunately don't have time or even the space to give you in full, is bracketed with these words. I have the first part of the bracket up above with the translation, and the second part down below. [reading in middle English]  A year passes a pace and proves ever new, first things and final can form but seldom. Here I'm using the very gorgeous translation by Marie Borroff, which is still widely available. At the end of the passage we go all the way through, winter to spring to summer to fall, to winter again. The poet tells us. [reading in middle English]  And so the year moves on in yesterdays many, and winter once more, by the world's law, draws nigh. In other words, time, seasonal, calendrical, renews itself always, unless you live in Westeros, in the same turning way. 

That is the science of calendar keeping, of keeping track of that same turning way. But for human beings as we surely all know, the same day next year is not the same day. This is especially true for Gowain who, one year after the Green Knight's visit, is headed (pun intended) he believes, to his death. Unlike the natural world that the entirety of the long passage asks us to contemplate with its seemingly infinite circular rhythm, Gowain only gets one lifecycle. He only has a limited number of "yesterdays many," until they are gone. That's why verb -- that I've underlined on the slide is so interesting. It refers, in middle English, to the passing of time, but there is a homonym, yernen that refers to desire, to yearning, to straining after something we can't ever quite grasp, like time itself.  That yearning, and the very real calendrical pressure faced by Gowain as he travels north to pay his debt is taken to a whole other level in Chaucer's other great long poem, the historical romance of Troilus and Criseyde. This is a work in which Chaucer's scientific interest in the measure of time is transmuted into an interest in the emotional quality of time's measurement, extension, and ultimately, disappearance. Likely written in the early 1380's and before the Canterbury Tales. 

Though ironically, since I'm thinking about time, the dating of Chaucer's works is still very much up for debate. This poem tells the love affair of Troilus, prince of Troy, and his lady Criseyde, in the closing days of the Trojan war. To make a very long story short, at the poem's end, Criseyde is traded to the Greeks and becomes a prisoner of war. She has promised Troilus, however, that she will find a way to escape and come back to him. The first time she makes that promise she does so in the language of weeks. "Within a week or two," she consoles him. He is a puddle on the floor. "I will be here." Then she promises her love, and I'm quoting from the poem here, that day by day he will here news of her, and before he knows it, she will be back in Troy. And ultimately she promises that she will be back on the tenth day after she goes. This promise of a daily update, a day by day report, is indeed what follows in the poem's last book. 

But it comes not from Criseyde but from the narrator who, in the last book of the poem, uses these phrases that I've put up on the slide, day-by-day and day-to-day, in a very different way from the way he does earlier in his story where we find it representing the process of falling in love. Indeed, by the end of the poem, Chaucer often links the phrase to images of the waning moon. It is the waning moon that comes to stand for Troilus's dwindling hope that he will ever see Criseyde again. Besides, as we all know, not least from medieval texts, women, like the moon, are changeable and unpredictable. As he waits for Criseyde Troilus becomes very painfully aware of what time, or at least what day, it is. We the readers are made to feel his pain in what is less a generally chronological way than a specifically calendrical one. A calendar of sorrow that is more and more minutely parsed as the days go by. In fact, these phrases, day-by-day and day-to-day, are used eight times each across the whole poem, but seven of the 16 uses are in the poem's last book when the love affair comes to its sad end. The last thing Troilus says to Criseyde face-to-face is a plea for her to keep the promise that she made to him. Now hold your day, he says, and don't let me die. 

Once she finally goes he wonders, how shall I endure these next ten days. His overall sense is that the days are simply passing too damn slowly. My students, in fact, often feel that the last book of the poem is also passing too damn slowly. They're all very happy by the time it ends. He is how he feels, with the translation at the bottom. "The day is more, and lenger every night, Than they be wont to be, him thoughte tho; And that the sonne wente his course unright By lenger wey than it was wont to do." It's not just that time is passing slowly. There actually seems to be more of it, so that, as Troilus tells Criseyde in one of his letters to her, "Ever worse from day to day am I." In a sense, what is going on here is that Chaucer is using the calendar's regularity, its day-to-dayness as a counterpoint to Troilus' deeply subjective experience of time. By a similar kind of accounting,  the narrator lets us know that Troy's calendar is also coming to a close. "Fortune," he says, "began to pull away the feathers bright of Troy from day to day til they were bare of joy." This rather horrible image of the stripping of Troy's bright feathers reaches for what is for Troilus it's personal culmination in Criseyde's third and last letter. In her first letter to him, she writes three, she says that she'll come as soon as she can. 

In her second letter she says she would come, but she did not know when. In her third letter she says this again but in a much more, shall we say, calendrically pernicious kind of way. "Come I will, but yet in such disjoint I stand as now that what year or what day That this shall be that, can I not appoint." What is so terrible about this is not simply Criseyde's lack of commitment, shall we call it. Troilus has already come to expect that from her. But the way it condemns Troilus, if he chooses to believe what she's saying, to life in a calendar with no fixed end, no way to stop counting not only the days, but also the years to which they add up. Because, as you see, Criseyde's syntax here, that I've put in red, "What year or what day" makes the ambiguous promise all the more hurtful. It reveals this newly expanded calendar of her thinking. It's no longer a matter of days or weeks or months. Now her return to him is potentially a matter of years. It's not a coincidence that this is the letter, which the narrator tells us, Troilus understands to be "a kalendes of chaunge," and kalendes of change. 

You'll remember I told you by even the 14th century, the word calendar could mean a warning. So for him this letter is a calendar, in the sense that it is a warning of a shift in Criseyde's feelings, as well as a change in the calendar she had promised him. This terrible change is prefaced in an earlier scene in the last book when Troilus very pathetically waits on the wall of Troy all day long for Criseyde to appear at the originally appointed time. First he sees a cart in the distance. He thinks it's her. It's not her. He waits, the hours tick by. He ties himself into knots thinking, well, did she mean when she said tenth day, did that include the day she lift or am I standing here a day too early? Is it tomorrow? Finally, the narrator tells us that he, Troilus, "He thought he misaccounted had his day." Interestingly, the word misaccount appears nowhere else in all of Chaucer's poetry. And actually, it appears very rarely in middle English poetry and prose overall. I've found it used only one other time before the year 1500. 

I don't want to make too much of a single word, but this, to me, seems to be appointing by Chaucer, again, to the calendrical pressure, the counting of days which is, in a very real sense, the theme of the poem's last book. This is a theme that continues right up to its very end when Troilus-- I'm sorry, I'm giving away the ending, but as my colleague Caroline pointed out, before the 19th century suspense isn't really want we're after when it come to medieval literature. In fact, we're told in this poem's first stanza what will happen. Troilus dies in battle and he's carried up to the heavens from which he looks down upon the Earth and he laughs at his previous cares. In fact, the end of this tragic romance takes us back almost to where I began this talk. Not to Westeros, but Augustine. The end of the poem is marked by Troilus's move from Earthly to divine time. A move emphasized first by a kind of scornful accounting for his worldly, or in Augustine's terms, scattered time. Here the narrator repeats several times over that, such is the end, "Swich fyn." Such is an end of all the human drama that has preceded the hero's death. "Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus for love! Swich fyn hath al his grete worthynesse! Swich fyn" has all of his royal estate above. 

Swich fyn his lust, his desire. "Swich fyn hath his noblesse," his nobility. But then the poem turns, finally, to a different kind of counting. It ends with a prayer to the Creator who lives, you'll remember, outside of time, who is "oon, and two, and three," one and two and three, eternally on life. And far beyond the scope of any human calendar. Thank you. [applause]