ABSTRACT
If, before clocks were universally present in people’s lives in the West, time tended to be fluid and experiences less chronologically organized throughout the individual day, there was still a consistent and rigorous marking of temporality by reference to the seasons and the calendar. Church bells, to be sure, marked the “hours,” but these were often only approximations of the time of day and signaled the canonical hours that were to be devoted to prayer by the clergy, monks and nuns, and pious laypersons. The calendar was in contrast fixed, with its yearly round of regular Church festivals, including the important saints’ days. Major feasts provided opportunities for ceremonies, playing games, performing plays, and engaging in various forms of entertainment. These observations naturally suggest a starting point in Charles Phythian-Adams’s study “Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450-1550,”1 even though his division into sacred and secular seasons is oversimplified and needs to be treated with great flexibility, as Eamon Duffy has warned.2 An empirical survey of occasions for plays seems required, starting with the beginning of the Church year four Sundays before Christmas and the slackening of playing in the course of the increasingly busy summer season.
