Month: December 2024

How many hours did civil servants work a hundred years ago and did they experience stress? What did the introduction of a weekly day of rest mean for crowd control in the Roman bathhouses? How did sex workers in early modern Japan manage to charge by the hour? And how did merchants schedule their business ventures during the insecure period of the Black Death? These are just a few examples of the questions addressed during the international Lived Time conference held here at Amsterdam from 26 to 28 November 2024.

For three days, 16 international experts discussed with our project team aspects of Lived Time: Routines, Temporal Norms and Identities from Antiquity to the Modern World. This gathering of specialists from different countries and different fields of expertise (history, sociology, religious studies, archaeology, literature studies, etc.) and with specialisms ranging geographically from Britain to Japan and chronologically from ancient Egypt to the present) offered a vivid illustration of the surging academic interest in temporality (how people are in time or experience time) in the humanities. This so-called ‘temporal turn’ has led to a wave of new publications on people’s relation with time in the last 15 years or so, building on a pre-existing and more gradually developing philosophical and sociological interest in this topic. The specific focus of the Lived Time conference was on everyday experiences of time: how people’s routines and everyday responses to societal norms about the timing of activities affect their performances of the self and the workings of societies.

The conference started with a general introduction and case study by the project team (Sofie Remijsen, Eugenio Garosi), followed a more conceptual introduction to the structures of social time by the experienced sociologist of time Ignace Glorieux. The remainder of the conference was organized around thematic clusters: the experience of time during historical epidemics (Jeroen Puttevils, Kristine Johanson), festivals (Stefan Feuser, Elsa Lucassen), rhythms of bathing and the lack thereof (Uta Heil, Anna Geurts), work schedules (Daniel Soliman, Gerrit Verhoeven, Mark Hailwood, Renate Dekker), sleep and idleness (Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Brigitte Steger, James Ker) and instruments for timing (Matthew Champion, Angelika Koch). The final session looked at modern experiences of time connected to the use of fossil fuels (On Barak, Peter van Dam).

In each session, as well as across the sessions, there were interesting points of convergence in the research of specialists from different fields. Daily rhythms, for example, persist and turn out to be quite conservative despite societal change. This has been observed in modern time use studies but is equally visible in the slow take up of Sunday rest or in what is now increasingly interpreted as a continuity in the hours spend in the early age of industrialization. Both in the first Egyptian monasteries and in the daily work of civil servants around 1900, to give another example, leaders allowed scope for individual adaptations to – at first sight rigid – institutionalized work schedules. Resemblances where also noticed in how people experienced the special qualities of non-active time.

Much has been written about our modern relation to time as a unique distinguishing feature. Rather than confirming this opposition between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ time, the diachronic nature of the conference allowed for identifying recurring elements in everyday experiences of time across cultural divides as well as the cultural specificities of each temporal experience. One of the central conclusions is, no doubt, that studying temporality is not (only) a goal in itself. It offers a new lens to sharpen our image of the cultural norms prevailing in historical societies and of the ways such norms and societies change.

Sofie Remijsen

What is the right time to arrive at a party? Arriving too early, even only a little, is kind of awkward, on time is fine, but it is definitely cooler to arrive ‘fashionably late’. Much later, however, is also not done. Luckily, most partygoers are able to navigate these unwritten social rules regarding time. These kind of mundane questions seem to us a modern luxury problem, but are they really something new? This is the topic of a lesson our team developed for secondary school children (ages 15-17). The outcome is clear: also in Rome, there were plenty of social conventions about appropriate timing.

The universality of the theme makes it of interest to audiences outside universities as well, such as adolescents. Roman time, moreover, is recognizable, as so many of the structures we use today find their origin in antiquity, such as the names of the months, the week and the 12-hour day. Even without much background knowledge, students can recognize Roman elements of time in their own daily lives. This is not typically part of the school curriculum, however. Of course, some handbooks do pay attention to the Roman calendar or the pagan origin of the week, but they typically present this information in a rather encyclopedic way. In our lesson, we want to reflect on the social experience of time as well, and invite the adolescents to reflecting on the role of time – and social conventions around time – in their own lives.

This past autumn I tried out this lesson at several schools in Amsterdam, in classes 4 and 5 VWO (ages 15-17). I gave these lessons to students as part of their Latin classes, but the material could easily be adapted to be well suited for a history course as well.

As an introduction the students were asked about their associations with the word time, which lead to a conversation about clock time, calendars and concepts such as ‘history’ or ‘the future’. Based on their input we spoke about the different possible rhythms in a year and how individual rhythms can differ between classmates. Ambiguities came up, such as school hours not measuring 60 minutes like a regular hour. And when we talk about the beginning of the year, do we mean the calendrical year or the school year? By speaking about time in an open dialogue, the theme of the lesson became clearer to the students.

Then I moved to a mainly instructive part where I taught them about Roman time measurement for hours, days, months and years. They could identify the remains of an older Roman calendar in our contemporary calendar and understood why the week is fundamentally different from days and months. We spoke about the introduction of a fixed day of rest on Sunday, and the possibly non-Christian predecessor on Thursday, illustrated by a papyrological source.

In the next part we looked at archeological sources regarding time, such as ancient clocks and a mosaic on being late and ended the lesson by reading three poems by Martial (Epigrams 2.27; 4.8; 8.67), in which he discusses everyday life and its rhythms. The students answered questions on these poems in small groups, and were asked to connect themes from the introduction to the texts. For instance in Epigram 8.67, where it is made clear that being on time for a dinner appointment is important, but it is equally not done to be so early, that you are almost on time for breakfast. To wrap up, we considered on which occasions the students desperately wanted to be on time (school!) and when it was actually better to be a little late (parties!), illustrating the close connection between time use and social norms.

The object was to make students reflect on the use of time and its connection to social norms, in the time of the Romans and now. They learned more about the Roman way of measuring time and structuring the year, and were invited to consider their own rhythms and customs as well. This combination of information and reflecting on personal experience proved well suited for the age group.

I was struck by the interest of many students, who kept asking relevant questions about the subject.

Making the connection to their own personal time use worked quite well, I think, although not all were eager to share information about their weekly rhythms – which was of course not mandatory.

The part of the lesson were I simply talked about historical time measurement and explained how the Romans structured their year was clearly the favorite element of the lessons for most students. They were intrigued by the differences regarding time to what we are used to in our time, and I think this is mainly to be ascribed to the aforementioned universality of the subject.

The question remains how this lesson can be logically embedded in the curriculum. It would fit well into a lesson series on daily life, or could provide more background information when reading Martial.

In the near future, we hope to publish a didactic article in the journal Lampas on the lesson including historical background information, meant primarily for secondary school teachers. The material for the classroom (in Dutch) will be published around the same time on this website.

Elsa Lucassen