(so y’all knew I’m obsessed with bridges, right? if you didn’t, now you do. This fabulous example is in Besalú, charming town in province of Girona. Small but lovely medieval Jewish quarter and lots of great walking in the area).
So….. studying history has started a lot of strange pondering about…. time.
Not just how quickly it passes, but the strange ways we measure it. To make this easier, let’s accept the basic smaller chunks and bump up to the bigger stuff: centuries and historical periods.
Centuries are just a convenient marker – and only really for the western / Christian World. For the Hebrew lunar calendar 2024/2025 is 5785 and on the Muslim lunar calendar it is 1446. To further complicate things, some Eastern Orthodox Christian religions use the old Julian calendar to calculate major feast days; Christmas is January 7 for those churches.
Conventionally we tend to think about centuries, but that is a totally arbitrary way of looking at large periods, rarely coinciding with the important events that are major shifts for a country or the world. More arbitrary, though maybe making more sense, would be to measure time using major events, which is what historians (sort of) do, even with some flexibility. The issue here, obviously, would be deciding what events to use.
Generally speaking, the medieval period is from the fall of the Roman Empire (arguably 450AD) up to 1450 – 1500, when various events happened that caused a shift or shifts across the Western world: the fall of Constantinople, Gutenberg’s moveable print, the end of Spain’s Reconquest and the “discovery” of the Americas. Modern starts then, but contemporary is more complicated: often considered the end of World War II, but another good contender for a shift-marker is the Napoleonic era – or even the French Revolution.
This gets more interesting if you think of your home country or a country you know very well. Every country has shift-markers, years or even specific dates that marked big befores-and- afters.
Most people from the USA would recognize these years and for last two, maybe even know exactly where they were at event-time: 1776 1865 1963 2001. In Spain four big dates would be 711 1492 1939 1975. Of course both countries have other shift years – it’s a fun mind game to think of what those years are. And get this, culled from a novel: different periods sometimes have associated colors. Or that’s what the author imagined, and if you think a little, you might see what she meant.
My history courses have sort of used the event system, but not totally. Which has been frustrating at times, if the beginning or end of a course’s time frame wasn’t totally clear, perhaps because there was no convenient event-marker. So it was very nice to have the fall course neatly bookended with Napoleon’s invasion of 1808 and Primo de Rivera declaring dictatorship in 1923; spring semester equally bookended by that dictatorship (not to be confused with Franco’s later regime) and Prime Minister Rodriguez Zapatero.
(it was kind of scary realizing that I have personal experience with about half of the spring semester time frame. Eeeek!)
Drilling down farther, we all personally have our marker years. Births, deaths, jobs, relationships, all structure our lives and how they intersect with other lives. I’ve been thinking about that lately because of COVID. I was fortunate to not lose any close friends and to only have one mild case, but there is definitely a before and after in my own life, as well as society in general. We’re not quite the same as before the pandemic, are we? Spain is less kissy (those two air kisses are a lot less frequent), I’m more aware of health and annoyed at people who don’t cover their mouths when coughing. Whether we will ever be able to really go back or not is a big question, and perhaps one to not ponder too often or too long.
That might be a fun or at least interesting topic for journaling. Pick your life marker years and go from there. How you got to that year / marker, where you went from there. Hmmmmm.
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On a last note about time: am I the only person who absolutely loves timelines? When I get a history book, the first thing I do is look to see if there is a timeline. Which in most Spanish history books is a no, so I was really happy to see one in my 19th century extra-reading book, and even happier to see one in my extra-reading book on the Civil War, and extremely complicated period of Spanish history. But you know what book has the very best timeline I’ve ever seen? The Gilitz-Davidson book on the Camino. It is only 900 – 1515, but covers all the kingdoms of Iberia in that pre-Spain time, plus the Muslim kingdom, the arts and some important international events. There is apparently some scholar working on a similar timeline starting year zero up to modern times. Its mega-format is hallway-length. Last I heard it was a work-in-progress, because how can you even finish something like that?