Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 312

This far-reaching volume engages with a recent trend in historiography – the history of time and temporality – which is brought into a conversation with the study of rural landscapes and societies in post-medieval Europe. The volume’s focus is on a discussion of three particular aspects: first, the measurement and organization of time in rural Europe or, as one editor calls it, the ‘architecture of time in the countryside’ (p. 247); second, the relationship between life and time in mountainous regions; third, the distribution of clocks and watches. The overall focus lies on central and western Europe, covering the thirteenth to twenty-first centuries.

The introduction presents a wide historiographical survey. At times, however, the introduction tends to become a bit descriptive. A stronger argumentative framing of the introduction would have been desirable to bring together the wide range of topics discussed in the French and German contributions of this volume: the impact of the calendar reform on rural sites; cultural attitudes towards the closing of contracts; the relationship between notions of time and labour in proto-industrial hubs of watch manufacturing; the temporal regimes of religious services; the links between migratory labour, animal husbandry, agriculture, and timing. This is an ambitious volume with an all-encompassing approach to the history of the longue durée attitudes of rural European societies towards time.

The volume convincingly challenges long-held assumptions about the rhythmicity of times and the dichotomy of urban and rural temporalities. Urban contexts have widely been associated with notions of progress, precision, and change, the editors emphasize, which led to a largely assumed dichotomy between ‘urban modernity’ and ‘the cliché of the immobility of the countryside’ with its ‘resistance against change’ (p. 13). In accordance with other recent publications on the history of early modern notions and practices of time, this volume questions such a dichotomy and argues for a larger plurality and parallelism of different understandings of time. It enriches historiographic debates by stressing the potential for innovation in rural societies. When challenging ‘the dichotomy of circular time and linear times’ (p. 14), however, it is worth noting that Jacques Le Goff himself never understood the temps de l’Église and temps du marchand in such dichotomous terms; this dichotomy is rather a misunderstanding resulting from later readings of his seminal Annales article from 1960. This could have been highlighted more prominently, also in order to reflect a bit more on this volume’s wide use of quantitative methods. Doesn’t a quantitative analysis lend itself to a rhythmic or linear narration about the past?

E. P. Thompson’s ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism,’ is a second classical study from the 1960s that features prominently into the discussions of this volume. In his contribution on ‘individual’ and ‘collective time’ in eighteenth-century rural Burgundy, Jeremy Hayhoe argues ‘that “ordinary” villagers adopted modern chronometry because they saw advantages in it, not because they would have been forced into it by the arrival of the factory and a discipline of time that followed’ (p. 66). Similarly, Anne Purschwitz focuses on Zeitverwendungsstrategien in her contribution about rural Saxony – a term that recalls Alf Lüdtke’s concept of Eigensinn (p. 84). When examining time in regard to rural labour, one of this volume’s strengths is clearly the rich discussion of proto-industrial settings. In her study of watch manufacturing in the German Black Forest, Michaela Hohkamp interweaves natural rhythmicity, agricultural production, inheritance practices, family structures, and labour division, in an inspiring discussion of how innovation could emerge, and the transformation of crafts into commerce. She stresses that the division of labour remained embedded within domestic economies of proto-industrial Black Forest communities. ‘The division of labour … was thus less orientated towards work performance, which could be measured in terms of temporal units, than in regard to the final product that could be sold. One is almost tempted to say that the production of timekeepers, in this case, prevented the measurement of working time’ (p. 135). The strength of such research is its emphasis on the social, economic, and cultural grounding of the historical experience of time.

Practices of timing were enmeshed in a variety of cultural practices, and temporal practices deserve to be discussed in such anthropological terms. The introduction lists some anthropologists’ and sociologists’ works on time in rural settings, for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s research on temporality among the Kabyle, published in 1963 (p. 9). However, this study is referenced without a discussion of what such work actually means for a historical-anthropological study of time in rural Europe. Bourdieu, for instance, argues that the ‘awareness of time is not simply one of the dimensions of his life experience, but rather the form in terms of which that experience is organised’ (Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Towards Time’, Mediterranean Countryman 6, 1963, 55–72, reprinted in John Hassard (ed.), Sociology of time (1990), pp. 219–37, here p. 219). The question is thus how rural ‘lifeworlds’ could shape the making and unmaking of temporality in historically and culturally specific situations. Michaela Hohkamp and Claudine Remacle (p. 184) present some fascinating materials for thinking rural times in such a manner.

The volume ends with Pierre Dubuis’s thought-provoking call for ‘an economic, social and cultural history of the living’ that includes an entangled study of time in regard to human, animal, and plant protagonists (p. 247). Unfortunately, this has not been spelled out in more depth. In light of recent work by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and historians Timothy J. LeCain and Edmund Russell on neo-materialism and coevolutionary histories, however, this seems to be a particularly promising trajectory of future research that puts the matter of rural environments itself centre stage for an interpretation of times. The editors’ general comments, thus, hold true: Bref, les historiens du temps ont encore bien du travail à faire (p. 21: ‘In short, historians of time still have a lot to do’).