Calendars, Clocks, and Crossings : Religious Temporalities in Medieval Middelburg

Time is always and everywhere encountered as rhythmic – it unfolds in repetition and habit, and in the interplay of particular durations and social and personal tempi. Critically, rhythm, as a musical experience and as a category of lived experience, is dependent on the contingencies of the moment. It cannot be taken apart from reflections on performance and reception, or the changing conditions of environments and events. In this article I examine some of the many rhythms that made up the time of the prosperous port city of Middelburg, situated on the island of Walcheren in Zeeland, from the fourteenth through to the early sixteenth century. Its source base is the city’s town accounts (preserved in nineteenth-century excerpts), its material record (ranging from small devotional objects to the city’s clocks), and the record of one extraordinary fifteenth-century visitor, the widely-travelled English mystic Margery Kempe. I take Middelburg in many ways as representative of the standard structures of urban time in medieval northern European towns. Christian liturgy and the ritual calendar were crucial to the experience of the city’s time, and its forms of social organisation and hegemony so critical to civic time making – town councils, religious institutions, guilds, and confraternities – are found across Europe’s regions in the period. But as these structures intersected with the particularities of Middelburg’s port, and its local cultures of pilgrimage and devotion, more particular rhythms of time appear. As a node in networks of trade and travel, Middelburg’s religious life was shaped by the mobility of historical objects and agents.

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