Researching the Calendar

The first step in determining the appropriate texts to use in my Book of Hours was to focus on the calendar. I needed to understand how the calendar worked and what the columns meant before I could design my own. I didn’t know the answer to even the most basic question: was the calendar a perpetual calendar or specific to one year?

Most of the books I consulted gave only tantalizing hints about the calendar. For example, in de Hamel’s chapter about Books of Hours in his History of Illuminated Manuscripts, he tells us that “manuscripts almost always open with a calendar of the Church year, listing saints’ days for each month and headed with an illuminated ‘KL’ at the top of the page. Ordinary saints’ days are usually written in black ink and special feasts are in red ink” (174). Other sources I consulted early in this process gave the same type of general information. Finally, I found Eric Marshall White’s essay on the Bridwell Hours, available at http://fll.smu.edu/latin/advent2000/bridwell/bridwell1.html, which describes the function of each column within the calendar: “The first column consists of nineteen seemingly scrambled Golden Numbers (for new moons); the second, of seven repeating Dominical Letter (for Sundays). . . . The third column in the calendar indicates each day’s date, not according to the system we now use, but rather the complex ancient Roman system, which was based on lunar cycles.” This confirmed that the calendar was a perpetual one; White’s essay gives a particularly amusing description of the “gymnastics” required to calculate the date of Easter in any given year using the calendar in a Book of Hours.

This system of time marks three crucial dates each month: the kalends (the first day, abbreviated “Kl”), the nones (the fifth or seventh day, abbreviated “N”), and the ides (the thirteenth or fifteenth day, abbreviated “Id”), and the other days in between are counted down until the next key day, for example, the “third day until the ides” (White). This can be indicated in different ways: sometimes there is a series of roman numerals counting down until the next key date, as in a fourteenth-century Book of Hours at the Walters Museum (Walters 88, reproduced in Wieck, 54). In the Grandes Heures of Jean, duc de Berry, the column repeats the abbreviations until the key date.


For example, the column might read: Kl, N, N, N, N, Id, Id, Id, Id, Id, Id, Id, Id, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl, Kl. In this example, the first, fifth, and thirteenth days are the key days, and the other abbreviations tell you which day you are counting down toward. Occasionally, this third column is left out altogether, as in the Hours of Englebert of Nassau.

Not surprisingly, it is easier to refer to a particular day by the name of the saint whose feast day it is. As White writes, “the day on which I am writing this is the sixteenth day before the kalends of April. It is easy to see why many might have preferred to call it “St. Patrick’s Day.”

However, that is not to say that every Book of Hours contained an identical list of saints’ days. On the contrary, this list varied greatly by geographical location and by time period, and accordingly, it is one important way in which scholars can localize manuscripts, this is, identify approximately where and when they were written. Books of Hours were written according to various “Uses,” the local customs of particular dioceses (de Hamel, 171), and each Use had its own textual variations. De Hamel describes how the Use influenced the calendar: “If your Book of Hours is of the Use of Paris and the patron saint of Paris, St Genevieve, is in red or gold on 3 January, then almost certainly the manuscript is Parisian. If you think it may be from Rouen, check for St Romanus singled out in red on 23 October” (184). Saints could not be included in a calendar until they were canonized by the Church, so saint names can also date a manuscript: “An especially useful name is St Bernardinus of Sena, who died in 1444 and was canonized in 1450. His cult spread very quickly, and when a determined owner assures you that his Book of Hours is fourteenth century, look at 20 May in the calendar: if Bernardinus is there, the book cannot be older than the mid-fifteenth century” (de Hamel, 184).

Because my persona lives in England, a Book of Hours she would own would undoubtedly be in the Use of Sarum (Salisbury), which by the fourteenth century was the predominant Use in England except for the diocese of York (Smith, 12). To determine saints’ names that would be appropriate for England in the late fifteenth century, I needed to find a calendar from a Sarum Book of Hours. Luckily, I discovered Erik Drigsdahl’s Center for Handskriftstudier I Danmark, which has the complete texts of several Books of Hours online at http://www.chd.dk/. One of these is a Book of Hours from c. 1505, made in Paris for sale to the English market (that is, in the Use of Sarum): http://www.chd.dk/cals/perg19kal.html. Drigsdahl also includes a column of saints compiled from various other Sarum sources of the same time period, and because this column standardized the abbreviations used to describe the saints, I chose to use this listing of saints, with a few modifications. The year 1505 is only 25 years or so off from my target date of 1480, so chances are slim that some of the saints listed would have been canonized after 1480. According to Wieck (153), standard abbreviations include “v.” for virgin, “pp.” for pope, “ep.” for “bishop,” and “ap.” for apostle. Changes I made included marking the May 1 feast of St. David, the patron saint of Wales, for red lettering, which would indicate the importance of this saint for my persona, a Welsh woman, and including the feast day of St. Deiniol of Bangor on September 11. (I discovered an entry for St. Deiniol in the Llanbeblig Hours, a Welsh Book of Hours from c. 1400 available online at http://www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=thellanbebligbookofhoursnl. This Book of Hours also followed Sarum Use, indicating that this Use was also used in Wales. I would have used it as my primary source for the saints’ names, but I found the script to be particularly hard to decipher on some calendar pages.)

The final piece of text to pin down was the spelling of the month names and any additional text I wanted to include. For example, the Llanbeblig Hours used the genitive Latin case for the months (Januarii), whereas the book on Drigsdahl’s site used the nominative Latin case (Januarius). The calendar could also be in a vernacular language, such as French, but because I couldn’t find any reproductions of complete calendars in English from this time period (as opposed to a page or two), I chose to stick with Latin. Some Books of Hours also include the number of days in the month and the lunar month; some include notes on the zodiac sign for the month (for example, the Llanbeblig Hours). In the photographs of calendars in Duffy’s book, a variety of introductory sentences can be seen, for example, on pages 47, 86, 123, 133, and 138. I chose to use “Januarius habet dies .xxxi. et luna .xxx.”

Here is the final text of the calendar I will use.

Calendar