IN CHAUCHER'S TIME, as in ours, the term “seculere” (secular) could be used to refer to a person, system, or institution that was not religious, often to distinguish it from a similar kind of person, system, or institution that was. So, a “secular lord” was a layman with property and authority over the people who inhabited that property, and in this he was analogous to an abbot, who also was a “lord” who ruled over a “house” and lands that extended beyond it. “Secular law” refers to customary law and royal law, as opposed to ecclesiastical law, which claimed jurisdiction over certain behaviours (such as violations of Christian sexual morality) and certain places (particular precincts).

But this distinction between secular and religious was grounded in another meaning of “seculere” that has largely fallen out of the term's modern usage: that is, “seculere” as a category of time, and in particular the forms and experiences of time that structure earthly life and so include, for example, historical time, human lifetimes, seasons, etc. The English word derives from the Latin, saeculum, whose semantic range showcases some of the many secular temporalities: it can refer to an individual lifetime, a generation, the term of a reign, a hundred years, a division of historical time, future ages, or the full extent of human history. For medieval Christians, secular temporalities such as these stood in contrast to sacred ones (to return to the more familiar sense), including liturgical time (which is calendrical and thus cyclical), eschatological time (linear time leading to the end of time in the Apocalypse), and especially divine timelessness—the atemporality of the Christian God, who exists not “before” Creation but “outside” time altogether. Indeed, time is one of the things God creates, from his position in a divine non-time.

The medieval use of “seculere” to refer to temporality or temporal orientation (how something is understood to be directed by or toward a particular kind of time) can be perplexing to modern readers, especially when it refers to a religious person, practice, or institution. In a modern context, a “secular priest” is an oxymoron.