This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of 'religion' and 'belief', it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity.
Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England offers a novel interpretation of the history of temporality in Victorian England. Fisher Høyrem s achievement in this book is to encourage historians of Victorian culture to think more carefully about the ways in which the nineteenth-century experience of time . Rethinking Secular Time invites historians to think again about how to best approach a subject so fundamental, yet so perplexing, as the history of temporality. (Joshua Bennett, Victorian Studies, Vol. 66 (3), 2024)