In his 1377 French translation and exegesis of Aristotle’s On the Heavens, the theologian and natural philosopher Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1382) challenged the prevailing Aristotelian explanation of celestial motion, which supposed that heavenly spheres required souls or intelligences to move. To explain how the heavens might move with perfect regularity, but without such animating principles, he summoned a technology that had recently become conspicuous in Western Europe—the mechanical clock. In Le livre du ciel et du monde, Oresme writes:

[The movement of the spheres] is somewhat similar to when a man has made a clock and allowed it to run and move by itself. In the same way, God let the heavens be moved continually according to the proportions that the motive forces have with the resistances, and according to the established order (288).[i]

Oresme’s references to “motive forces” and “resistances” evoke the internal workings of an early mechanical clock. Its wheels are set in motion by a weight, whose descent is alternately stopped and released by a mechanism called an escapement. By breaking the weight’s descent into regular increments, the escapement not only made the clock tick, but it also allowed the clock to display—or to sound—hours of equal length.

Historians of medieval and early-modern science have since debated whether Oresme’s analogy anticipated later comparisons of God to a clockmaker who set the universe in motion and left it to run its course (Kaye 1998, 224–225). This interpretation is, however, complicated by the second part of Oresme’s argument in Le livre du ciel et du monde:

And perhaps, from the moment God created the heavens, He ordained and appointed angels who thus move them and will move them for as long as it pleases Him (288).[ii]

As Edward Grant observes, Oresme reintroduces angelic movers immediately after likening the heavens to a self-moving clock (1994, 478). When read as an anticipation of early-modern mechanistic cosmology, Oresme’s assertions appear contradictory. How can the heavens move autonomously and with the intervention of an external actor? However, this contradiction disappears once Oresme’s ideas are properly situated in their late-medieval context. Clock comparisons circulated widely, extending beyond natural philosophy to theological, moral, and political reflection. These medieval metaphors did not depict autonomous, mechanistic movement, but movement fundamentally dependent on continuous maintenance and occasional repair. To understand how and why these comparisons emerged, we must attend to the clocks themselves as fallible material objects in the late-medieval era, then examine the intellectual work performed by these metaphors, before finally considering the specific social context that fostered their rhetorical use. Together, these lines of inquiry reveal that the clock’s dependence on skilled intervention made it especially suited to imagining cosmic and political orders sustained by divine mediation and human governance.

* * *

The escapement-regulated mechanical clock emerged somewhere in western Europe toward the end of the thirteenth century, but where it originated and what purpose it initially served remain unknown. Its development has been variously connected to practical timekeeping and the mechanical representation of celestial motion (Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, 45–124). Whatever their origins, mechanical clocks spread rapidly during the fourteenth century and soon became prominent fixtures in civic, ecclesiastical, and courtly settings (Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, 125–72).

Yet, for all their popularity, these early clocks were inaccurate machines that required constant specialized care. A glance at the representation of clocks in late-medieval literature shows that they were by no means associated with punctual timekeeping. In De remediis utriusque fortunae, Petrarch (1304–1374), for instance, compares philosophers to clocks, both alike in their perpetual discord (II, Praef., §31–32). Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), in a similarly ironic vein, depicts the rooster Chanticleer in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale as infinitely more accurate and trustworthy than the new mechanical clocks (2853–2854).

Only a careful balancing act between opposing forces—the pull of the driving weight and the checking action of the escapement—could prevent clocks from becoming dysfunctional, a fact that engendered their association with the virtue of temperance (White, Jr. 1969). A perfectly functioning clock could serve as a model of self-control and moderation, but such a feat was difficult to attain for mere mortals. In his advice book for married women, the learned knight, diplomat, and royal advisor Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405) links the image of the clock with the exemplary figure of the Virgin Mary. As conveyed in Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (1389), the clock’s wheel represents nature at work in Mary’s body, turning at a measured pace only through her unique chastity and sobriety; the escapement, moving to and fro, is likened to her mediation between Christ and humanity, by which she restrains the weight of divine justice (Mézières 1389, 170–171).

In most cases, however, temperance did not result from the clockwork itself but had to be exercised from without, recalling the angelic movers of Oresme’s heavens. The metaphors frequently feature a clockmaker watching over the mechanism or intervening to mend a broken clock. Mézières’s magnum opus, Songe du Viel Pelerin (1389), offers some compelling examples. Here, the figure of Divine Providence describes the clock through which she governs the world: Nature is the clock’s wheel, while the weight of Justice is tempered by the escapement mechanism of Grace. This theological image finds its counterparts in reflections on both secular and ecclesiastical politics. Mézières depicts the kingdom of France in this text as a broken clock and instructs the king to fix it. Elsewhere, he describes how the ambitions of the high clergy have deregulated the Church’s metaphorical clock, requiring divine intervention and human reform to restore it to proper functioning (Mézières 1389, 1383–1384, 1125–1126, 1131, 1377).

The intervening horologist was, in general, a crucial component of late-medieval clockwork comparisons. The craftsman’s importance is encapsulated in the 1368 verse text L’Orloge amoureus—or “The Clock of Love”—by the chronicler and poet Jean Froissart (c. 1337–1405). The poem constructs an extended comparison between the minutiae of mechanical clockwork and the forces animating the lover’s heart. Wheels, weight, cord, foliot escapement, dial, striking train, singing wheel, and bells all receive an allegorical interpretation within the framework of courtly love and its constitutive tension between desire and restraint. Yet the machinery is unable to ensure stable movement by itself, for the clock cannot run unless there is someone “to watch over and care for it … diligently managing and regulating it” (Froissart 1368, vv. 927–932).[iii]

Taken together, these examples reveal a consistent understanding of clockwork, in which motion is not self-sufficient and requires continual maintenance. This understanding has, however, received little attention in histories of the mechanical clock and its cultural significance. Lewis Mumford famously cast the mechanical clock as an innovation that helped bring about modernity and capitalism, while Otto Mayr saw in clockwork an ideal representation of the centralized, top-down authority of the absolutist state. More recent scholarship has challenged the deterministic logic of such narratives by instead examining how clocks were absorbed into existing cultural practices. These works have shown that the mechanical measurement of equal hours did not produce a sharp break with older ways of experiencing time in late-medieval life, but became one discernible strand in its complex temporal fabric. Yet clockwork metaphors remain comparatively underexplored. And while the unreliable functioning of late-medieval clocks helps explain the form of these analogies, it does not explain why clockwork became such a compelling object of comparison. To answer that question, we need to shift attention from the ideas these metaphors may have anticipated to the features of late-medieval intellectual culture that made clocks and horologists meaningful objects of comparison in the first place.

* * *

For an imperfect machine to become intellectually productive as a metaphor, mechanisms first had to become objects of sustained reflection in their own right. Although machines—from mills to devotional automata—were ubiquitous in medieval life, E.R. Truitt reminds us that their inner workings and their status as human artifacts were not significantly thematized before the fourteenth century. This development is visible in late-medieval universities, where natural philosophers steadily reconsidered inherited Aristotelian explanations of motion and causality. A related problem for these thinkers concerned the ontology of artifacts: whereas Aristotle had drawn a firm distinction between nature and art, late-medieval natural philosophers increasingly treated artifacts as legitimate objects of study. The natural philosopher and mathematician Blasius of Parma (c. 1350–1416), for example, denied that natural and artificial bodies were ontologically different, arguing that the motion observed in both bodies depended on external movers. This broader rethinking of nature and art helps explain why the inner workings of a man-made machine could plausibly illuminate those of nature.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the clockwork metaphor was perfectly suited to an intellectual universe moving away from the assumption that the natural and human worlds constituted self-regulating systems. While such ideas had begun to gain currency in the late thirteenth century, the balance had shifted by the time clock comparisons appeared, once again favoring an active, ordering intelligence in polity and cosmos alike (Kaye 2014). The revival of Augustinian ideas among late-medieval theologians is emblematic of this shift. The fourteenth century witnessed a turn away from the belief that human reason could grasp the entirety of the cosmos and toward an anthropology that foregrounded humanity’s connection with God. Theologians gradually affirmed God’s absolute power to rearrange the created order and returned to older ideas of human free will and divine predestination (Courtenay 1980). Fittingly, in the Songe du Viel Pelerin, Philippe de Mézières calls Providence’s clock the “horloge de saint Augustin” and devotes far more attention to Justice and Grace than to Nature’s operations. For him, clockwork was above all a metaphor for the relationship between divine providence and human volition, unfolding in history, not nature.

Beyond their theological application, clockwork metaphors were also closely bound to the social world of late-medieval courts. Mechanical clocks were a conspicuous presence in courtly spaces, both as monumental clocks for all to see and as smaller portable objects appearing in private households (Rapin 2013; Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, 119–120). The clock’s metaphorical representation expanded this technology’s publicity, enhancing the prestige of their patrons. Indeed, all the aforementioned figures were shaped by the influence of courts. Oresme studied at the royally endowed Collège de Navarre before serving the king of France, Charles V, as a secretary and translator. Mézières became advisor to the same ruler after decades of service to various princes, kings, and popes. Petrarch’s career was determined by his proximity to the papal curia at Avignon and to the lords of Milan. Chaucer spent much of his life serving the kings of England as a courtier, civil servant, and diplomat. A traveling cleric, Froissart moved in courtly circles from England and the Low Countries to Provence and Italy. Courts brought these writers into proximity not only with one another’s intellectual worlds but also with clocks themselves.

Within this courtly universe, the image of an imperfect clock that required a horologist to ensure its functioning carried a distinct political meaning, reinforcing a social system predicated on the balancing of competing interests under monarchical governance. Paris is a particularly apt case in point: the French court was both a major power center, where groups and individuals competed for royal favor, and a lively intellectual hub, offering scholars and artists employment as well as access to resources. The royal library, founded by Charles V in the Louvre, ensured the circulation of books among a wide circle of courtiers (Kopp 2015). These intellectual resources supported divergent political and philosophical projects, giving rise to disagreements and often sharp polemics among courtly authors. Yet those same authors all shared a stake in a system that accommodated their rivalry under the authority of a wise ruler (Anheim 2000). Thus, the image of a horologist maintaining or repairing a mechanical clock may have served a legitimating function. In employing such metaphors, the authors reinforced a political and intellectual order predicated on wise rulership.

* * *

Medieval clocks were technically imperfect. Amid growing reflection on human-made artifacts and their analogous relationship to nature, authors turned this imperfection into a meaningful object of comparison. The resulting metaphors enabled them to discuss a contingent world in which lawlike regularity depended on intelligent stewardship. This vision of contingent order applied to matters of theology and natural philosophy, but also to political thought and practice, as the association between an unreliable clock and a savvy horologist reflected the growing importance of courts as centers of intellectual life. Historicizing mechanical clocks, alongside the practices of care and maintenance on which they depended, helps us avoid reducing the late Middle Ages to a stage in a teleological narrative of technological modernity and recover the wide range of associations that an emergent technology could inspire.

Conversely, an intellectual history of early clockwork metaphors can help place modern ideas about technology into a longer historical perspective. Historians of technology have increasingly contrasted innovation and invention with maintenance and repair by drawing attention to the often-hidden labor and knowledge required to keep the world moving. Developed largely through the study of modern technologies, this scholarship often associates maintenance with socially marginalized labor, in contrast to the cultural prestige accorded to innovation. Late-medieval clock metaphors reveal a different relationship to innovation and maintenance. Contrary to the familiar cliché of medieval hostility to innovation, medieval culture was deeply attuned to novelty. The authors surveyed here brought innovation and maintenance together as a fruitful rhetorical resource. Moreover, maintenance did not evoke low-status labor: late-medieval horologists were sought-after specialists who commanded substantial salaries (Dohrn-van Rossum 1996, 173–196). By casting God and the earthly ruler as horologists, these metaphors associated technological maintenance with the highest forms of authority. Late-medieval clock metaphors therefore show that technological maintenance has a history not only as a material practice but also as a language through which different visions of social and political order could be expressed.

[i] « C’est aucunement semblable quant un homme a fait un horloge et il le lesse aler et estre meu par soy. Ainsi lessa Dieu les cielz estre meuz continuelment selon les proporcions que les vertus motivez ont aus resistences et selon l’ordenance establie. » Translations, here and throughout this piece, are mine.

[ii] « Et par aventure, des ce que Dieu créa les cielz, Il ordena et députa angels qui ainsi les moevent et mouvront tant comme il Lui plaira. »

[iii] « Qui le garde et qui en songne … diligamment l’aministre et attempre. »

This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum, “The Conceptual History of Technology.”

Karl Peeter Valk is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He specializes in the intellectual, cultural, and social history of late medieval Europe.

The research for this essay was supported by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (grant agreement No 101270515).

Edited by Jonas Knatz and Tomi Onabanjo

Featured image: Detail of “Divine Wisdom watching over a clock.” Miniature from a French translation of the devotional treatise Horologium Sapientiae (“The Clock of Wisdom”) by the German Dominican friar Henry Suso (1295–1366). Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, ms 10981, fol. 4r (1448). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.