Apart from flights, telephones and television, one of the most significant ways in which life in the twentieth century differs from antiquity is the pervasive presence of clocks. Our lives are scheduled around specific times and intervals in a fashion that would have been impossible in ancient Rome.
When and how did this profound change come about? Did monasteries acquire the first clocks and then, in league with an emerging merchant class, enforce their own rigid time standards on the surrounding populace? This view—the accepted interpretation for at least 50 year—is carefully dissected and challenged in Dohrn-van Rossum’s revisionist account.
