In contrast to other medieval documents, incense instructions were written without conscious consideration for time. As such, this analysis primarily focuses on chronographic and chronopolitical information. A temporal analysis of a set of incense instructions - both as a manual for mixing incense and an expression of noble scholarship - sheds light on how people measured time and scheduled their lives during the medieval period. While incense held significant importance in religious contexts, it also played a role as a traded good in economic calculations or as a medium for artistic expression. As a commodity closely tied to the religious realm, incense was used as a medium for measuring time in a rather secular function. This paper aims to support its thesis by examining the temporalities inherent in clocks and specifically in incense clocks, focusing on the symbolic form of economy as a means of delineating economic time. Research suggests that multiple time conceptions can be found within the same symbolic form across various realms of medieval life. Time was variable during the medieval period, with multiple morphologies of time existing simultaneously in Japan.
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