| Re: How to measure time in a medieval world?
The Greeks had water clocks, too.
But the main point is that while there were plenty of time-keeping devices invented before and during the Middle Ages, during the Medieval period a clock would have been, for most people, purely a novelty item of no practical daily use.
Of course, just like other conveniences, the more people have them, the more they come to depend on them, and pretty soon everyone has to have one. That wasn't yet the situation with clocks in the Middle Ages. They didn't rule peoples lives or their thinking the way they did now.
Which does, indeed, make for some interesting vocabulary questions if you are trying to make your characters' internal and external dialogue reflect that sort of world view.
For the books I'm working on now, I've divided the day into several periods based on the quality of the light -- noë (brightening, dawn), érien (brilliance, noon), yffarian (waning light, afternoon), anoë (twilight, evening), anerüi (absence of light, midnight), and malanëos (utter darkness, the time between midnight and dawn). Having done so, I've found there aren't so many opportunities as I would have thought to work those designations in naturally, but I hope and believe that what I have done adds a bit of atmosphere. |