ABSTRACT
Chaucer scholars have long recognized that the experience, measurement, and understanding of time have changed since the Middle Ages and that modern readers must be educated in the conceptions of time that Chaucer would have shared with members of his original audience if they are to appreciate the full extent of Chaucer’s artistry. Chaucerian time has been studied from many perspectives, in particular those of medieval theology and natural philosophy.1 Despite the deep learning and broad scope of such studies, extending from theoretical speculations about the nature of time, to moral implications of time, to astrological and even mechanical methods for calculating time, they do not begin to exhaust the range of meanings that time would have had for a fourteenth-century intellectual. Less studied by Chaucerians but no less familiar to Chaucer is time as a component of rhetoric.
