Time, as Matthew Champion observes in the preface to his study of temporalities in the Low Countries, has long been at the heart of historiography of the fifteenth-century north. Johan Huizinga famously characterized the age of the Burgundians as a period of lateness, the crepuscule of the medieval period; others saw it as just the opposite, the seedbed of the modern period, of a remarkably new era of commercial innovation, global expansion, religious upheavals, and scientific transition, among other things. Time itself, as Champion also underscores, has nevertheless never been a category of analysis fully embraced by historians, even though chronology and temporality are their quarry. Binary models, upon close inspection by historians, rarely hold up. Champion rightly undoes them in his book, rejecting the lateness-beginnings model of chronology and the division between natural time and quantifiable time. In their place, he explores time's variety in the cities of the late medieval Southern Low Countries, selecting this set of territories and the fifteenth century because both have been at the heart of debates over chronology and period, offering, therefore, an ideal era and place to test a theory of temporality.

Champion offers six very different case studies of time's complexity: the diversity of times—from work time to religious time—in the city of Leuven, a commercial town in Brabant that in 1425 grew in importance with the establishment of a university; a theology of time in the famous Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament by Dieric Bouts in that same city; liturgical music, exemplified by a musical treatise by Gilles Carlier at the cathedral chapter of Cambrai; a study of the 1458 entry ceremony of Philip the Good into Ghent, including a fresh look at Jan and Hubert van Eyck's famed Ghent altarpiece; computation of time and the theological debate over it between Paul of Middelburg and Peter de Rivo in late fifteenth-century Leuven; and how time is configured in Werner Rolewinck's Fasciculus Temporum of 1474–75, a genealogical history. Champion's work has several strengths. Most obvious is the book's attention to time itself; its conception and organization are thus rendered a category of historical inquiry as fruitful, for example, as space has become for many scholars of this and other periods. Some of the chapters are stronger than others. Among the best is the study of Carlier's treatise on music at the cathedral chapter of Cambrai. Champion uses this example to show how liturgical music influenced religious and social communities’ sense of the self's relationship to divinity and chronology.

If Champion offers original insights and a solid plea for historians to pay careful attention to how layered and essential time is to the past, he also invites questions about his approach and thesis. Foremost is what impact his case studies really had in the larger historical context. He is focusing on theological conceptions of time that were common to the medieval clergy, and therefore not particularly different in the Low Countries than elsewhere. They were of most interest to religious communities, the church itself, and the educated clerical elite. But it's not clear at all that theological and liturgical temporalities deeply affected people and their social, political, and everyday lives. Yes, they were entirely steeped in Christian inflections of worship, chronology, and sensibility. At the same time, a theological treatise, a single altarpiece, a musical treatise, a work on genealogical history penned by a single author in Latin—how do these have broader meanings or broader impact, especially because they are not presenting a coherent conception of time, but are simply steeped in particular conceptions of time? There is not much attention, except in the first case study of Leuven's temporalities, of what mattered just as much: work time, social time, and political time. The market-saturated world of Low Country cities means commerce was fundamental and everywhere, and yet there is almost no attention to commercial time, which absolutely commanded more people's attention than a liturgy or a single entry ceremony.

Champion's book is nevertheless important for making time matter, and for challenging historians to think more carefully and less in simple binaries—secular versus religious—about time. There are several compelling, fruitful avenues of further research pointed out, and a particularly strong case made for scholarly attention to time, self, and emotion, and to the power of Christian temporality that nurtures expectations of fulfillment—of, that is, fullness. The chapter on music charts out why the world of church and religious music more generally should matter a lot more to studies of late medieval cities, where historians have dwelled, especially in the Low Countries, on the secular world. In a key sense, Champion is proposing a corrective to the scholarly attention to the secular realm of urban life, to simplistic understandings of civic time, and to the neglect of religious time and its broader impact than merely the clergy and religious confraternities and associations.