BnF Ms. Fr. 640, fol. 10r: “Powder for hourglasses”
Primary Author: Stephanie Pope
Transcription:
<title id=”p010r_a5″>Pouldre dhorloges de sable</title>
<ab id=”p010r_b5″>Elle se faict fort subtille & sans estre subgecte a la rouille & par sa pesanteur<lb\>
coulante prenante du plomb i lb. et le faire fondre et lescumer et<lb\>
purifier de sa crasse puys verse dedans quattre ℥ de sel commun<lb\>
pulverise subtilement et prends bien garde quil ny aye ni pierre<lb\>
ne terre Et incontinent que tu lauras verse mesle tousjours<lb\>
tres bien avecq un fer jusques a ce que le plomb et le sel soict bien<lb\>
incorpore et leve le incontinent du feu tousjours meslant Et sil te<lb\>
semble trop grossier broye le sur le mabre et le passe par un tamis fin<lb\>
puys lave le tant de fois que leau sembl soict claire jecta{n}t ceste petite<lb\>
pouldre qui nagera renovant ta{n}t de fois leau quelle demeure toute unie</ab>
Translation:
<title id=”p010r_a5″>Powder for hourglasses</title>
<ab id=”p010r_b5″>It must be made very fine and not subject to rust and with enough weight to flow. Taking i lb. [217] of lead, melt it and skim and purify it from its filth, then pour into it four ℥ of finely ground common salt, and take care that there are no stones or earth. And immediately after pouring it, stir continuously very well with an iron [tool] until the lead and salt are quite incorporated, and take it immediately off the fire, stirring continuously. And if it seems too coarse, grind it on a marble slab and pass it through a fine sieve then wash it as many as times as necessary until the water runs clear, throwing out the fine powder that will float on it, renewing the water as many times as necessary until it is completely cleared.</ab>
The hourglass is a piece of technology whose symbolic valences have now superseded its practical use-value: its status as a visual icon – in vanitas paintings, for example, as a reminder of man’s mortality – is far more prevalent than its function in a pragmatic context. This, however, was not always the case, as the recipe for hourglass sand in BnF Ms. Fr. 640 makes plain. To think about the construction of one of the hourglass’s key components necessarily entailed approaching the device from a material as well as a symbolic perspective. What might this recipe be doing in the working manuscript of a sixteenth-century French practitioner? As it transpired, the recipe for “powder for hourglasses” gave us hugely valuable insights into the flexibility of ingredients in early modern recipes, the material referents of certain metaphors in early modern religious literature, and the experimental quality of the domestic setting in this period.
The recipe within the context of Ms. Fr. 640
This recipe, which appears within the first few pages of Ms. Fr. 640, is in many senses sui generis within the manuscript. Its uniqueness is manifest firstly in the fact that there are no other references to timekeeping devices in the manuscript, pertaining to their production or otherwise: the hourglass, then, is the only horological technology that the author-practitioner includes in his treatise. The recipe’s grouping within the manuscript also testifies to its idiosyncratic status on a more local level. On the page on which it appears, folio 10r, it is preceded by four other recipes (for “Imitation jasper,” “Stil de grain yellow,” “Roses,” and “Purple colour”); however, none of these bear any resemblance to the “powder for hourglasses” recipe, either in content or in style. Indeed, while the first four recipes on folio 10r are broadly concerned with decorative production and practices (painting, specifically, in the case of the commentary on the pigment “Stil de grain yellow” and the “Purple colour”), the recipe entitled “Powder for hourglasses” seems to be concerned with the production of an object that is much more functional than aesthetic in nature. This functionality is also demonstrated in the style, specificity, and syntax of the latter recipe: while the preceding recipes are generally quite non-specific, in both their discursivity and their evocation of implicit knowledge supposedly possessed by the reader (the author-practitioner deploys the phrases “as you know” and “you know how” in the recipes for imitation jasper and moulding roses, respectively), “powder for hourglasses” begins with the forceful modal “you must…”, includes temporal markers such as “immediately” and “continuously”, and specifies the requisite quantities of ingredients.
For Francisco Alonso-Almeida, it is the increasing move towards “more elaborate and specific language to make recipes as informative and accurate as possible,” which the formula for “powder for hourglasses” evinces, that marks a definitive shift from the linguistic construction of medieval recipes, which are “more characterised by the presence of vague expressions and omissions (quantities, application, storage, dosage) requiring interpretation by the user”.1 Although one should be wary of the definitive period demarcations Almeida draws in this statement (and, of course, it should be borne in mind that Almeida’s argument pertains specifically to English, primarily culinary recipes between 1600 and 1800), it does helpfully suggest that we might view “Powder for hourglasses” in light of a nascent interest in providing more specific, technical instructions in recipes.
Ingredients and tools
The recipe for “Powder for hourglasses” requires very few ingredients – just two, in fact – and neither of them, it seems, would have been exotic or difficult to procure in sixteenth-century France (nor indeed are they today). The principal constituent of the hourglass sand is lead, one pound of which is called for by the recipe. The recipe gives no explicit or implicit rationale for the use of lead as the metallic component of the sand, but certain properties that might make it useful in this context are as follows:
- It possesses a low melting point (327.5C), which means that the temperatures required to replicate the recipe would be easily achievable.
- It is a malleable element, which means it deforms easily.
- Lead is a very common element, and, given that many other recipes in the manuscript call for this metal, it would presumably have been readily available in sixteenth-century France generally, and, more locally, in the workshop of our author-practitioner.
The second ingredient in the recipe is stipulated as “ground common salt”. The phrase “common salt” (“sel commun”) is used by the author-practitioner several times throughout the manuscript, and is likely a transliteration of the Latin term sal commune, which refers to sodium chloride. It is not clear if “common” salt possessed qualities that differed from, say, “rock salt”, which is also a component of various recipes in the manuscript.2 The term is perhaps used to indicate that the salt called for by the recipes does not need to be of any particular sort; it is perhaps also used to distinguish salt (i.e., the compound sodium chloride) from other “salts”, such as sal ammoniac and sal petrae. Given the implications of the phrase used by the author-practitioner, we decided that the type of salt we used was probably not of too much consequence for the outcome of the recipe, so we used a “Sherpa Pink” natural Himalayan salt which was already present in the lab after its usage in the previous semester’s experiments (Fig. 1 – a packet of pink Himalayan salt). Himalayan salt is extracted from a mine in the Punjab Region of Pakistan, and consists of 95-96% sodium chloride; its pink colour derives from the presence of iron oxides.
The recipe, finally, calls for the use of an iron tool to stir the molten lead mixture (iron presumably being an ideal material because its melting point is much higher than that of lead) and a marble slab on which to grind the lead-salt mixture if it is too “coarse”. We approximated the iron tool with a spool of tightly-wound iron wire (Fig. 2 – our ad hoc ‘iron tool’). Although a marble slab was available in the lab, we decided to use one made of granite instead, as it is a more resilient material and thus probably a more suitable surface on which to grind lead.
Preparing the salt
The first step we took towards recreating the recipe was grinding the salt into a finer powder using a pestle and mortar (Fig. 3 – ground salt in mortar). The recipe is preoccupied throughout with emphasising the necessity of producing a particularly fine powder, so we were concerned to render the salt as ‘impalpable’ as possible (in fact, it seems true of most recipes involving ‘powders’ in the manuscript that the finer their consistency, the better). We also thought that the powder must be of a certain minimum fineness to flow well in an hourglass, although of course ascertaining said fineness of our sand with any degree of accuracy would be difficult. During the grinding process, we found that salt could indeed be reduced to a consistency that felt velvety rather than granular, although this required working the salt against the wall of the mortar for a fairly sustained period of time.
The recipe states that four ounces of salt is required to combine with the molten lead; for our first iteration of the recipe, therefore, we used half a cup of salt, which equates to roughly four ounces. However, after performing the recipe, we found that very little salt indeed needed to be combined with the lead – perhaps only an eighth or so of the amount we had prepared. Clearly, although the symbol in the manuscript (℥) refers to an ounce, the author-practitioner is unlikely to have meant to indicate that measurement. With a little investigation, we found that the symbol for the ounce is very similar to that of the dram (ʒ), a unit of measurement within both the avoirdupois weight system and the apothecaries’ system (Fig. 4 – the possible erroneous symbol in the manuscript).
The avoirdupois system is thought to originate in either France or Florence, and is based on a pound of 16 ounces; a dram in this system is equal to 1.77 metric grams. The apothecaries’ system, on the other hand, divides the pound in 12 ounces, and was typically reserved for indicating weights and measurements in medicinal or scientific recipes; in this system, the dram’s mass is greater – 3.89 grams. We thought, given the similarity of the symbols for the ounce and the dram, that the symbol indicating an ounce might have been a lapsus calami on the part of the author. Therefore, if the manuscript’s author was referring to the dram rather than an ounce, the recipe calls for either 7.08g of salt (the avoirdupois dram) or 15.56g (the apothecaries’ dram) — both of which are significantly less than 4 ounces! When we ran the experiment for a second time, we found that we used about 25g of salt in combination with a pound of lead. Although this measurement does not correlate exactly with the avoirdupois dram or the apothecaries’ dram, it does suggest that the latter is being referenced by the author-practitioner of the manuscript.
Recreating the recipe
After grinding the salt into what we considered to be a suitably fine powder, we began the recipe proper by melting down our pound of lead (which, incidentally, we found to be a surprisingly small amount, due to the metal’s density). This was done by placing the lead in a crucible couched in a sand bath in one of the fume hoods, and heating first the lead directly, and then the crucible with a blowtorch (Fig. 5 – heating lead in crucible). Given lead’s relatively low melting point, the metal became molten within a matter of minutes. As the recipe stipulates that one should “skim” the molten lead and remove any “filth” from it, we removed the dross using a small piece of paper and a spoon (this, we found, was somewhat akin to skimming off the film of milk or cream that can form on coffee left to sit).
Although the recipe implies that the molten lead should continue to be heated whilst the salt is added, in our first experiment we stopped heating the crucible briefly in order to pour in the salt. We then recommenced heating the crucible, all the while stirring the salt into the molten lead with our iron implement. The second time we ran the experiment, we kept heating the crucible throughout the addition of the salt. This discrepancy, however, did not seem to have any discernible effect on the final product.
A few minutes after the addition of the first measure of salt, the mixture clearly began to ‘incorporate’: it became more resistant to our stirring actions, and what looked like powdery, grey grains were beginning to form on the surface of the crucible. At this stage, we poured the mixture onto a stainless steel dish in the fume hood (Fig. 6 – lead-salt mixture on stainless steel dish). We found that some of the lead had not incorporated with the salt, but had instead solidified at the bottom of the crucible; we therefore decided to repeat the previous steps of the recipe again, melting the lead remaining in the crucible and combining with more salt in order to yield as much ‘powder’ as possible. After the second addition of salt, the remainder of the lead incorporated, and we poured it onto the dish along with the first batch of lead-salt mixture.
Before we began to work the mixture on the granite lab, as stipulated in the recipe, we decided to sieve it, in order to separate the largest pieces from the very fine powder, the former of which we would work on reducing into smaller pieces first. Removing the pieces of lead-salt incorporate that did not pass through the fine sieve we used, we set these onto the granite slab, also placed inside the fume hood, and began to grind them with a pestle (the instrument one should use for this process is not specified in the manuscript, so we decided to make use of the pestle we had previously been using to grind our “common salt” – perhaps the author-practitioner assumed his readers would use any suitable implement at hand, in which case a pestle would certainly be appropriate and readily available for sixteenth-century artisans).
At this stage, however, we discovered that the larger pieces of material that we were trying to grind down into powder seemed very resistant to our efforts. In fact, it seemed that this material might not even be a combination of lead and salt, but simply solid pellets of lead. After a few minutes of work, it seemed that we were not going to get anywhere trying to grind down pure lead, so we decided to just keep the powder that had passed through the sieve.
The next step in the process, washing the powder in water and “throwing out” the powder that settles on the surface of the liquid, was one about which we were initially very sceptical: the consistency of the lead-salt mixture that we already had seemed liked it would be perfect for hourglass sand. It was velvety and, while not totally impalpable, sifted easily through our (gloved) hands without sticking to them. We were also unsure about what would happen to our mixture if we washed it in water: if we had just combined molten lead with salt, and the reaction that had occurred was purely physical rather than chemical, wouldn’t passing the mixture through water simply dissolve the salt?
We were so incredulous about the efficacy of this ‘washing’ action that we decided to only use half of the powder we had produced from the lead-salt incorporation; therefore, if the action did not work (as we strongly suspected), we would still have some of the fruit of our labours left with which to work! Judging by eye, we decanted around half of the velvety lead-salt powder into a white plastic bowl, and simply poured in lukewarm water from the tap. The effect was immediate: the water turned a very deep grey, while our powder remained at the bottom, now a sludge-like consistency (Fig. 7 – the first washing of the lead-salt powder). It now became apparent how this process worked, which had been very unclear up until this point: we had been very confused about what the powder would do when placed in water, but as it settled at the bottom of the bowl we realised it would actually be a relatively simple task to keep refilling and emptying out the water in the bowl without actually disturbing the powder at the bottom. We were reminded at this juncture of Ken Albala’s adjuration against scepticism when recreating historical recipes, and the importance of avoiding the temptation to amend processes and actions to what seems more logical to our modern-day perspectives. “[To] learn about historical…procedures”, as Albala writes, “we must trust what is on the page”.3
The lack of reaction between the water and the lead-salt mixture might also explain why the substance was used as hourglass sand. Willem Morzer Bruyns and Stuart Talbot, subscribers to an Oxford-based mailing list (RETE) dedicated to the history of scientific instruments, both pointed out via email correspondence that “it was essential that, whatever materials were used in sand glasses, they had to be non-hygroscopic”.4 Hygroscopy refers to a substance’s ability to attract and hold water molecules from its surrounding environment, through either adsorption or absorption; sugar is an example of a hygroscopic substance, as is salt (NaCl). This was important due to the fact that glass-blowers could not blow hourglasses in one piece until the middle of the eighteenth century: up until that point, the two bulbs would be blown separately and then held together by sealing wax and a knot that could potentially allow moisture to enter the bulbs and interact with the substance inside, thus comprising the hourglass’s accuracy.
We repeated the washing process six times, until the water was running as close to clear as we thought likely to achieve. Finally, we strained the last batch of water into a bowl with cheesecloth stretched over the top of it, and put our lead-salt mixture that did not pass through the cheesecloth into a small bowl and left it in a fume hood to dry. Examining the composition of our newly-washed powder, what had before felt smooth and velvety in texture now looked like miniscule lead spheres, and felt much more granular to the touch. The texture of our washed powder actually tallies with recent research in the mechanics of hourglass sand flow, which has suggested that the best material for sand is ‘ballotini’, which are “tiny [glass] beads of subspherical shape”.5 They are around 40-160 microns in diameter, and because of their round edges they flow smoothly through hourglasses.6 Although our lead-salt mixture was not composed of grains that small, they were roughly spherical in shape, which might suggest why this mixture produces an effective hourglass sand (Fig. 8 – the texture of our sand).
Contemporary recipes for hourglass powder
Having recounted our experience with reproducing the “Powder for hourglasses” recipe from Ms. Fr. 640, we now turn towards the historical questions posed by the recipe itself, which we noted at the outset of this annotation. We begin with a brief history of the hourglass.
A.J. Turner avers that “[t]he origin of the sand-glass…is historically a mystery”.7 Although the device has its precedent in the ancient Egyptian water clock known as the clepsydra, the hourglass as we know it seems to be a medieval invention, and has “a surprisingly brief history”.8 The earliest ‘reference’ to its existence is iconographical and symbolic in import: it appears in a series of frescoes dating to 1338 in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, entitled The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, and it is held by the female figure of Temperance, one of the six virtues of good government (Fig. 9 – Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s The Allegory of Good and Bad Government). Clearly, even in the earliest stages of its life, the hourglass possessed some kind of artistic or emblematic resonance, a resonance that would extend into the Renaissance, during which it became ubiquitous as a memento mori in vanitas paintings of the period (Fig. 10 – Peeter Sion the Elder’s Vanitas Still-life). In some artworks, the hourglass is even portrayed as one of the accoutrements of an embodied Death: for instance, in Albrecht Dürer’s copper engraving Ritter, Tod, und Teufel (Knight, Death, and the Devil; 1513), the grisly Death figure clutches an hourglass in a skeletal hand, a reminder of the brevity of the Knight’s life (Fig. 11 – Albrecht Dürer’s Ritter, Tod, und Teufel).
We also detected the presence of the hourglass in an artistic representation of a different sort: the Trachtenbuch (“clothing book”) of Matthäus Schwarz (1497-1574), a German accountant who worked for the famous Augsburg merchant Jakob Fugger. The Trachtenbuch is Schwarz’s record of the clothing he wore between the years 1520 and 1560, a lavish series of more than 100 watercolours depicting Schwarz in various different garments. In one of these images, Schwarz is depicted wearing an hourglass attached on his yellow hose to his calf (Fig. 12 – from the Trachtenbuch, Fig. 12a – detail of hourglass attached to hose), which the accompanying text identifies as measuring eight minutes (“mit einem uhr am schenkel von acht minuten”), although no indication is given as to why the hourglass should be required to measure this interval of time (Fig. 12b – detail of text). In this image, the hourglass seems to function analogously to the way it does in its role as a vanitas object, gesturing towards the larger mundus transit trope but also to the ephemerality of the fashions that Schwarz is recording (indeed, the “fickleness of fashion and the vanity of sumptuous apparel” was well-trodden ground in early modern sermons).9 Both the hourglass and fashion, then, seem to act as a reminder that glory is fleeting – all things pass in time. However, it is also worth noting that Schwarz himself appeared to be generally fascinated by marking the passage of time in art, and, more specifically, artistic likenesses of himself: he was painted on his 29th birthday by Hans Maler zu Schwaz with an hourglass around his neck (Fig. 13 – Hans Maler’s portrait of Schwarz), and a later portrait from 1542, painted by Christoph Amberger, includes Schwarz’s horoscope (next to the glass of wine) and records Schwarz’s exact age (45 years, 30 days, and 2 ¾ hours) and the time of the painting, 4:15pm on 22 March 1542 (Fig. 14 – Amberger’s portrait of Schwarz). Perhaps in Schwarz’s case, the hourglass does not so much function as a memento mori but more as part of a celebration of the power of art “to fix in both time and space something that ephemeral and changeable”.10
The first extant textual reference to hourglasses, however, is in a ship inventory: hourglasses were used for measuring time during marine journeys, as the movement of the sand between the two glass ampoules would not be affected by the movement of the ship (unlike a water clock). A. J. Turner, though, has suggested that accounts of the hourglass originating primarily in a maritime navigational context hem the invention into a niche that does not properly represent its diverse early usage: identifying the first nine allusions to the hourglass or ‘sandglass’, Turner reveals that these objects also fulfilled diverse other functions: they were desired as wedding presents, for instance, and played a role in civic life; indeed, one Swiss town council order avers that “the tolling of the town bell for the quarter and half hours should be regulated by a sand glass”.11
Although there is some confusion over the earliest functions of the hourglass, it is apparent that at some point the production of hourglass sand became part of a repertoire of standard household recipes. This is evident from a recipe in Le Menagier de Paris, or “The Goodman of Paris,” a text written in the last decade of the fourteenth century (c. 1393) by a wealthy Parisian burgher for the instruction of his wife in various marital matters. Under the miscellaneous heading “Other small things that be needful,” along with recipes for various preserves and rosewater, and immediately preceded by a “cure” for toothache and followed by “Poisons for slaying a stag or a boar,” features the subsequent recipe:
TO MAKE SAND FOR HOURGLASSES. Take the grease which comes from the sawdust of marble when those great tombs of black marble be sawn, then boil it well in wine like a piece of meat and skim it, and then set it to dry in the sun; and boil, skim and dry nine times; and thus it will be good.12
Although the ingredients in this recipe differ from those in Ms. Fr. 640, the processes and their ends seem analogous to our recipe: heating and skimming are both required, and the fact that the three principal steps of the recipe (boiling, skimming, and drying) need to be conducted a total of nine times suggests that a very fine powder should be the end product, just as in our manuscript’s recipe.
It is less easy to establish why the production of hourglass sand became something akin to a domestic chore. Perhaps its presence among household recipes was partly due to the ready availability of the necessary ingredients (variant seventeenth-century recipes state that pulverised eggshells, another non-hygroscopic substance, can also be used to make sand of this sort, which would certainly have been easily accessible, and an efficient use of domestic waste). More than this, indeed, the various recipes for hourglass sand — lead and salt, eggshells, “grease” from marble — suggest that it could be produced from any materials that the experimenter had on hand. Thus lead and salt may be the principal ingredients of our author-practitioner’s recipe because these two substances would have been in ample supply in his workshop, and, while the marble grease that features in the Menagier de Paris’s recipe seems a little more exotic than lead or eggshells, we should bear in mind that great marble tombs were being constructed in Paris in the fourteenth century, and therefore this particular material probably played a more significant role in quotidian life than we might initially guess. The notion that hourglass sand might be produced by any scraps of material readily available ties in with Michelle DiMeo’s comments on the nature of early modern domestic practice as “ideally frugal” and “self-sufficient;”13 it also tallies with Elaine Leong’s study of medicine production in the early modern home of Elizabeth Freke, which, Leong notes, was primarily based on “common herbs and spices” and used “butter, eggs, and cream” (i.e., common household ingredients) in salves and balms.14 This might also explain the spike in popularity experienced by the hourglass in the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries: if the ingredients for hourglass sand could simply be anything readily available, hourglass sand could (and would) be produced frequently; increased hourglass production would cause people to find more and more uses for it in their daily lives, and demand for its production would consequentially increase. G. Bernard Hughes also states that the cost of producing hourglasses was low, which might suggest why this recipe still features in a sixteenth-century French manuscript, despite the fact that clocks would be available at this time.15 Given the expense of purchasing a clock as opposed to creating an hourglass, perhaps one’s timepiece of choice partially reflects a kind of social stratification, in which clocks are the preserve of a relatively wealthy elite and hourglasses function as a less costly and therefore more democratic means of time measurement.
Certainly, at any rate, the hourglass gained increased prominence in the sphere of quotidian life during the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries, and was used to measure intervals such as the length of sermons, cooking time, and breaks from labour.16 The hourglass was also employed in more specialist domains: it marked the length of lectures for the students at Oxford University, curtailed “the prolix orator’s flow of words” in law-courts and the House of Commons, and even helped medical practitioners in measuring pulses.17 They were also used in craftsmen’s shops in order to regulate working hours, which might suggest why our author-practitioner is interested in their production – he could have needed one as part of his working environment. R. T. Balmer attempts to rationalise the late development of the hourglass by suggesting that it “came into being as a result of some need within the value system of the society at the time, and that this need did not exist before. It is possible that the societal concept of time evolving from a nebulous continuum to a quantifiable organisable duration and was becoming an individually marketable item whose subdivision had commercial value”.18
The fact that the hourglass was used to measure the length of sermons can perhaps help us to understand more comprehensively why most references to the hourglass in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English texts are found in religious literature. A search for the term ‘hourglass’ in the years 1500-1750 on Early English Books Online returns 113 hits in 87 records, and the majority of the references to the hourglass are in printed sermons, emphasising its symbolic function as a reminder of man’s mortality: for instance, in a sermon of 1641 by Jeremiah Burroughs, the author states that “All men in worldly honours are like an houreglasse; now this end is uppermost, by and by this end is done…”19 It is also often coupled with the candle, an emblem of the fragility of life: in the Puritan church leader Richard Baxter’s A Christian directory (1673), Baxter admonishes his reader to “Remember that as soon as you begin to live, you are hasting toward the end of your lives: Even as a Candle as soon as it beginneth to burn, and the Hourglass as soon as it is turned, is wasting, and hasting to its end”;20 this pairing is also found in Thomas Bentley’s The Fift Lamp of Virginitie (1582), in which a prayer “to be vsed by old women” features the line “the houre glas is almost run, my candle is almost burned out, and thine everlasting iudgement draweth on”.21 The obvious explanation for the hourglass’s recurrence in sermons is thus its symbolic cachet; however, it is perhaps feasible that the hourglass was so often referred to because it combined the auditory impact of the sermon with the immediate visual environment of churchgoers. The textual fabric of sermons might, therefore, have been influenced by the material features of the location in which they were delivered.
Finally, it is interesting to consider that, as A. J. Turner notes, “ordinary [or, domestically-produced] sandglasses were not accurate”.22 Although domestic hourglass sand production clearly became widespread in early modern Europe, as the recipe in Ms. Fr. 640 evinces, it resulted in a product on which one could not rely too heavily for accurate temporal measurements. Can this tell us anything about the conception of time in early modern Europe?
While we are, of course, used to thinking of time, on a practical level, as a universal reference point, the lack of time standardisation across areas of the same country in sixteenth-century Europe meant that time was much more heterogeneous than we now consider it to be. Indeed, even the hour was not necessarily a fixed unit of time: the practice of seasonal, or unequal hours, divided the time between sunrise and sunset into twelve hours, which of course meant that the length of the hour increased in summer and decreased in winter. This non-universal understanding of time seems to be reflected in the manuscript by the use of anthropocentric forms of temporal and spatial measurement. For instance, the author-practitioner is fond of measuring objects in terms of handspan (see, for instance, the discussion of furnace sizes on fol.16r), an individually-variable form of measurement. Even more intriguingly, he also refers twice to the recitation of the paternoster as a measurement of time duration: on fol.103r, in a recipe entitled “Something excellent against burns”, the author states that an oil-wax must be stirred for “the time you need to recite 9 pater noster”, and on fol.114r, a mold must be dipped in water to cool it for the time taken to recite one paternoster. The presence of a prayer as a form of time measurement not only provides another fascinating link between theology and horology, but suggests that time existed less as a universal standard for our author-practitioner, and more as something that was local to individuals and their measuring practices. The existence of domestic hourglass production, even given its inaccuracies, thus tallies with the fact that time in early modern Europe was non-standard rather than universal, variegated rather than homogeneous, and perhaps even less fiercely monitored than to which we are now accustomed.
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Morzer Bruyns, Willem. Email correspondence. 30/4/2015.
Power, Eileen, trans. and ed., The Goodman of Paris (Le Menagier de Paris): A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris (c. 1393). Routledge, 1928.
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Turner, A. J. Of Time and Measurement: Studies in the History of Horology and Fine Technology. Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993.
1 Francisco Alonso-Almeida, “Genre conventions in English recipes, 1600-1800,” in Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550-1800, eds. Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 72.
2 Two notable types of recipes in BnF Ms. Fr. 640 that call for common salt are 1) recipes that involve liquefying silver (“Making silver runny”, fol. 120v, and “to make argenta run”, fol. 123r) and 2) formulas for bleach (“bleaching casting silver”, fol. 128v, and “bleach”, fol. 148r).
3 Ken Albala, ‘Cooking as research methodology: experiments in Renaissance cuisine’, in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, ed. Joan Fitzpatrick (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2010), 98.
4 Willem Morzer Bruyns, email correspondence, 30/4/2015.
5 A. A. Mills, S. Day, S. Parkes, “Mechanics of the sandglass,” European Journals of Physics, 17 (1996): 99.
6 Sand itself, ironically, tends not to be used in hourglass sand production because its grains are too angular, thus preventing smooth flow. Ronald Smeltzer, in email correspondence of 30/4/2015, suggests another reason why the use of sand is not widespread: “Perhaps an advantage of not using sand if a softer material was available is that since sand and glass are the same material (silica), the falling sand could slightly grind away the glass, thus changing the diameter of the fall zone over time”.
7 A. J. Turner, Of Time and Measurement: Studies in the History of Horology and Fine Technology (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993), 162.
8 Mills, Day, Parkes, “Mechanics of the sandglass”, 98.
9 Mary Beth Rose, “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl”, in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, eds. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 242.
10 Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 101.
11 Turner, Of Time and Measurement, 164.
12 Eileen Power, trans. and ed., The Goodman of Paris (Le Menagier de Paris): A Treatise on Moral and Domestic Economy by a Citizen of Paris (c. 1393) (Routledge, 1928), 304.
13 Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, introduction to Making and Writing Recipe Books, 1550-1800 (Manchester University Press, 2013), eds. Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, 11.
14 Elaine Leong, “Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82 (2008): 158, 159.
15 G. Bernard Hughes, “Old English Sand-Glasses”, Country Life (1951).
16 Interestingly, some literature of the period suggests that measuring sermons by the hour is a Catholic practice – in Thomas Hart’s The foundation and rise of many of the practices, customs, and formallities of the priests, lawyers, and people of England examined (London, 1659), Hart asks his reader “does not [sic] the Papists say their Mass by the Hour-glass?” (p. 8). It is possible that Thomas Carlyle is referring to a similar practice when he asserts, at the beginning of The French Revolution, that “Priests’ Litanies [are] read or chanted at fixed money-rate per hour” – an hour that might perhaps have been measured by the hourglass (Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, vol. 1 [New York: AMS Press, 1980], 2.
17 Samuel Guye and Henri Michel, Time & Space: Measuring Instruments from the 15th to the 19th Century (Praeger Publishers: New York; Washington; London, 1971), 266.
18 R. T. Balmer, “The Operation of Sand Clocks and Their Medieval Development”, Technology and Culture, 19 (1978): 616.
19 Jeremiah Burroughs, Moses his self-denyall (London, 1641), 63.
20 Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London, 1673), 552.
21 Thomas Bentley, The Fift Lamp of Virginitie (London, 1582), 192.
22 Turner, Of Time and Measurement, 169.