It's an incredibly broad scope. For the sake of argument let's just say, Europe, 1000-1500 or so.
I'm reading Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, treatise on nationalism. One of the passages stood out to me.
Auerbach gives an unforgettable sketch of this form of consciousness:
"If an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were announced and promised and the latter 'fulfills'... the former, then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally-a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension... It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding ... the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omnitemporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event.
He rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present.33 In such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance.
Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences. But it is a conception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it fully into account, we will find it difficult to probe the obscure genesis of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of 'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.
So from what I'm understanding, at some point nearing the modern era (he was very vague on the time period) people became aware of time as a linear construct as opposed to living in their own isolated little individual timelines, that the history of the world was one as opposed to existing in different realms.. or something.
Anyone care to comment? I'm not even sure if I'm understanding this passage correctly or if I'm even asking the correct question lol
at some point nearing the modern era (he was very vague on the time period) people became aware of time as a linear construct as opposed to living in their own isolated little individual timelines
[massive sarcasm warning] Isn't it so very convenient how this happens? We look back to the point at which we already know Modernity starts, and bam, there's more evidence that's where Modernity starts.[/massive sarcasm warning]
The language Anderson is using here, of empty or homogeneous time versus the "Messianic" or "religious" time that preceded it, is one which is unfortunately very common in the works of people who like to theorize about the origins of modernity and secularization, from Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age to Michael Gillespie's recent The Theological Origins of Modernity. (Could they come up with more ridiculous and pretentious titles?) The purpose of such language is not really to define a coherent world-view for the middle ages, because the middle ages does not have ontological existence. Instead, it creates a "before" against which the authors can define "now".
Periodization is a convenient figment historians use to limit their scope and construct coherent narratives. But often - and this is particularly true for the medieval/modern divide - scholars tend to forget that the division of time is indeed a fiction, and this is, in my not particularly humble opinion, the problem with Anderson's language. For example, the suggestion that the global calendar is an invention of modernity ignores the centrality and global nature of the calendar to all of Christianity, as seen in the various disputes over the date of Easter. And note that, even if it were true, the construction presented only actually applies to Europe, and to small pieces of Europe at that, but it's stated in a way to make it seem like it works as a universal.
For an incredibly good take-down of this sort of scholarship, and on the origins of the idea of a modern/medieval divide, see Kathleen Davis' book Periodization and Sovereignty.
The fundamental question of how people in the past perceived time is a fascinating one, but there are not currently works I would recommend, beyond Davis'. Scholars keep writing books about "the discovery of the individual", and this keeps getting earlier, almost as if we can find "the individual" wherever we look. The fundamental idea that there is nothing that privileges our modern conception of time, is, I think, really useful to keep in mind. But how it manifests is the product of specific times and places, and should not be reduced to generalities.
Like SheepExplosion, I'm skeptical of this argument. There is a theological tradition, known in the Middle Ages, that because God is omniscient and outside time, God perceives events as, to all intents and purposes, simultaneous. But I don't see any evidence that medieval thinkers saw time this way. In general, I think it's fair to say that medieval scholars of most varieties regarded time (as humans perceive it) to be the ordered unfolding of God's plan for the salvation of humanity. It was common, for instance, to order history into "ages" or periods. One author I work on, for instance, espoused a common view that time can be divided into the age of natural law (Creation to Moses), scriptural law (Moses to Jesus), and the law of grace (Jesus to the end of time). Many other schemes abounded, not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sure, a theologian could have acknowledged that from God's perspective, time is effectively simultaneous, but medieval historians were very clear that the history of the world is one continuous stream beginning with creation and ending, at some point in the future, with the Last Judgment. If something changed about the perception of time between the medieval and the modern, a possibility I wouldn't deny out of hand, I don't think it was the development of the linearity of time.