ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to clarify the links between the European miracle and the technical development of the mechanical clock, the influence of monasteries, and the way citizens in Italian city-states began to live according to clock time. From the fifteenth century onward, the application of the mechanical clock quickly diffused in Western Europe and, slowly but surely, changed the life of citizens. One might say that the West has developed an approach in which time has become “a basic element of human organization” (Hassard 1989: 80). Yet eventually, as historian Macey (1980: 17) said: “the advances of western man have been made at the price of an increasing servitude to time.” You may wonder about the meaning of this statement, but this chapter will demonstrate that somewhere between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, clock time began to impose a regime unknown to any other civilization. This chapter will, therefore, be confined to the question how this servitude to time has been developed by looking at the way clock time has become applied in its ordinary form, or man-in-the-street sense.
