The Quid Novi MONTREAL, QC
MCGILL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF LAW - FACULTÉ DE DROIT DE L’UNIVERSITÉ MCGILL
46 09 28 JAN 2025
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR The Shape of Time Jessica Keer Li | 3L
Time is a nebulous, abstract concept, often defying simple definition. Its measurement eludes any universal and objective standard, shaped instead by cultural context, intellectual advancements and social convention. Historically, each civilization developed its own methods of marking time: the Persians compiled king lists, the Greeks recorded Olympiads, the Romans kept fasti, and during the medieval period, European scholars relied on Biblical chronology. In modern historiography, we generally rely on a chronological and linear representation of temporality. Indeed, much of the language we use to discuss time implies a linear framework. In the visual arts, for instance, the standard physical arrangement in museums illustrates this perspective: most exhibits are displayed from the oldest works to the most recent, with the line serving as a central figure. On a smaller scale, the same holds true in everyday visual representations such as almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs. Because the linear metaphor of time is so pervasive
nowadays, it may come as a surprise that the practice of mapping chronological relationships onto measured timelines is relatively recent. Much of this development is due to the work of scientist and theologian Joseph Priestley, who published two influential timelines in the eighteenth century: the Chart of Biography (1765) and the New Chart of History (1769). Priestley’s Chart of Biography was the first biographical timeline to use individual bars to represent a person’s lifespan, making it possible to compare the lifespans of as many as 2,000 individuals on a single chart. Beyond the data presented, Priestley’s true innovation laid in introducing and popularizing a new, secular methodology and epistemology of time, which made it feasible and customary to plot a range of factors on a linear temporal framework. As a result, an infinitely extending linear timeline – stretching from the past, through the present, and onward to the future, ad infinitum – has become our prevailing representation of chronology, sharply contrasting with the previous, cyclical Christian conception of a divinely appointed endpoint that leads into a new beginning.
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