Church time to market time

Barbara Adam ( Time ) remarks, “In medieval Europe the Church as God’s representative on earth was the keeper and guardian of time. Not even the sovereign had jurisdiction over it. The sovereign had the monopoly over weights and measures; the churches were in charge of time in all its forms, but most especially calendar time.”

A key shift in the collapse of the medieval system was the shift from church-ruled time to market-ruled time. Modern forms of time control are “to a large extent about obtaining dominion over time for economic gain and social advantage. For this to happen, the locus of control had to be transferred from natural adn supernatural to human powers.”

More specifically, she claims that the change in Christian evaluation of usury was key, and this took place in the context of the triumph of clock time. The argument that time could not be sold because it didn’t belong to human beings eroded as artificial clock-time, commodified for the market, became time simpliciter .

“Time is money” replaced the medieval commonsense of “Time is God’s gift.”