. Devices to measure and indicate time are descended from astronomical instruments and, like most complex devices, tend to have a history that is international in character. The emergence of a purely mechanical timekeeper in the 14th century, the weightdriven clock, marks a triumph of medieval ingenuity. The French contribution to this development seems to have been in the construction of elegant timepieces and the refinement of mechanisms originally invented elsewhere in Europe.
Monastic houses served as the context out of which mechanical clocks developed. Water clocks with alarm mechanisms attached were used from the 11th century onward to awaken the brothers for midnight services. The rules of Saint-Victor in Paris, for example, made the registrar, a subsacristan, responsible for calibrating and adjusting the water clock, while archaeological remains of SaintVillers abbey dated 1267–68 show a detailed tablet on stone for this task. The only surviving manuscript illustration of a medieval water clock is found in a French Bible moralisée of ca. 1285. In his addition to the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Meun shows Pygmalion as possessing domestic versions of these alarm “clocks.”
The earliest known examples of purely weight-driven clocks are English (Norwich, 1325; Saint Albans, ca. 1330) and Italian (Milan, 1333?; Padua, 1364), but the speed with which these new devices spread was remarkable. Their acceptance was no doubt enhanced by the fact that the weight-driven mechanism could be made quite large and could drive all manner of ancillary machinery, especially puppet jackwork and bell-ringing devices. The new clocks quickly became objects of royal, noble, and municipal pride, either in the form of gigantic tower clocks or fine miniature chamber clocks. Froissart’s poem L’orloge amoureus (1369) describes the new machine in detail and praises it lavishly. The cathedral at Strasbourg had an elaborate astronomical clock whose fame extended the breadth of Europe. To punish the rebellious burghers of Courtrai, Philip the Bold of Burgundy in 1382 confiscated their tower clock and put it to use in his own capital, Dijon. An inventory of the possessions of King Charles V in 1380 gives evidence of several chamber clocks in fine metalwork. A similar inventory of 1430 shows the first evidence for spring-driven clocks among the possessions of the duke of Burgundy.
The making of astronomical clocks, timekeepers accurate enough to be useful for observational purposes, was the epitome of the clockmaker’s craft. Jean Fusoris (ca. 1365–1436), a physician and canon at Reims and later at Notre-Dame in Paris, was also the headmaster of a shop making instruments and clocks. His astronomical timepiece for the chapter at Bourges (ca. 1423) functioned until the 19th century.
In France, the clock was also adopted as a symbol of the virtue of temperance and the quality of wisdom. Manuscript illuminations of Christine de Pizan’s Épistre Othea (ca. 1400) show Temperance adjusting a large clock. The image became conventional in Burgundy toward 1450, when Temperance came to be shown with clock, bridle and bit, spurs, eyeglasses, and a windmill. A French translation of Heinrich Suso’s Horlogium Sapientiae, done in the early 1460s, shows Solomon as a clock repairman and Lady Wisdom surrounded by timekeeping instruments. These illustrations show how integral the clock had become to the European sense of order in natural and human affairs.
Bert S.Hall
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