How the Tudors Told Time

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How time passes - or how it is understood to pass - itself has a fascinating history. For the Tudors, the uneven hours of the Medieval reckoning were cast aside for an age of mechanical clocks and watches, albeit mainly for the elite.

In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb meets Dr. Christina Faraday, to explore how the Tudors told the time and how, with this cultural shift, timepieces came to have symbolic meaning about a person's status in the portraits of the period.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	As historians, the passing of time is really our stock in trade.
0:10.0	But even how time passes, or at least how it is understood to pass, has a history.
0:17.0	Today, we're going to be thinking about how time was reckoned in Tudor England and the
0:22.4	time pieces that framed that knowledge.
0:26.0	For this is the new age of mechanical clocks and even watches, at least for the elite.
0:33.2	When the uneven hours of medieval reckoning have been cast aside in favour of time by the clock.
0:40.7	And with this cultural shift, time pieces came to have symbolic meanings and exploring these
0:47.2	can give us a profound insight into the mentality of the Tudors.
0:52.9	My guest today has done just this, in a journal article that she would call Tudor Time Machines.
0:59.2	She is Dr. Christina Faraday, a research fellow at Gondwell and Keyes College Cambridge, and
1:04.0	she focuses especially on her research on art, architecture and ideas in Tudor England.
1:10.2	She's also an arts and humanities research council, BBC New Generation Thinker, which is a
1:15.3	scheme for top early career researchers seeking to learn how to present their ideas in accessible
1:21.0	ways to new audiences, which fits her very well for explaining to us how we can understand Tudor Time.
1:34.7	Dr. Faraday, it is an absolute pleasure to welcome you to not just the Tudors.
1:39.6	It's very exciting to be here.
1:41.9	And to have an opportunity to talk to you about your work, this brilliant punning title that you
1:47.3	have Tudor Time pieces that we're going to talk about.
1:50.0	Maybe we should start, though, by getting a sense of time before the Tudors.
1:55.0	Can we talk about how time was reckoned in response to the seasons up until about the 15th century?
2:01.2	Absolutely. Actually, this is one of the things that I really love about studying history,
2:06.2	is the way that it can make you so aware of how many things that you just take for granted as being
	...

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