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  • Scandalous Error: Calendar Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe

    Scandalous Error by Nothaft, C. Philipp E.;

    Calendar Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe

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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP Oxford
    • Date of Publication 22 February 2018

    • ISBN 9780198799559
    • Binding Hardback
    • No. of pages378 pages
    • Size 241x163x27 mm
    • Weight 730 g
    • Language English
    • Illustrations 30 black and white images
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    Short description:

    The first comprehensive study on the history of calendar reform and calendrical astronomy in medieval Europe, this volume draws on a range of sources over a period of more than 1600 years, from the Julian calendar of 46/45 BC to the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, to shed new light on the place of astronomy in medieval intellectual culture.

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    Long description:

    The Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, which provided the basis for the civil and Western ecclesiastical calendars still in use today, has often been seen as a triumph of early modern scientific culture or an expression of papal ambition in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. Much less attention has been paid to reform's intellectual roots in the European Middle Ages, when the reckoning of time by means of calendrical cycles was a topic of central importance to learned culture, as impressively documented by the survival of relevant texts and tables in thousands of manuscripts copied before 1500. For centuries prior to the Gregorian reform, astronomers, mathematicians, theologians, and even Church councils had been debating the necessity of improving or emending the existing ecclesiastical calendar, which throughout the Middle Ages kept losing touch with the astronomical phenomena at an alarming pace. Scandalous Error is the first comprehensive study of the medieval literature devoted to the calendar problem and its cultural and scientific contexts. It examines how the importance of ordering liturgical time by means of a calendar that comprised both solar and lunar components posed a technical-astronomical problem to medieval society and details the often sophisticated ways in which computists and churchmen reacted to this challenge. By drawing attention to the numerous connecting paths that existed between calendars and mathematical astronomy between the Fall of Rome and the end of the fifteenth century, the volume offers substantial new insights on the place of exact science in medieval culture.

    Nothaft's main achievement is to demonstrate the staggering variety of approaches and rich texture of medieval conversations around the technical problems of the calendar. The thirty black-and-white illustrations give the merest hint of the masses of unedited mathematical manuscripts through which the author has sifted.

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    Table of Contents:

    Introduction
    The Julian calendar and the problem of the equinoxes in the early Middle Ages
    The ecclesiastical lunar calendar and its critics, 300-1100
    Calendrical astronomy in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance
    The consolidation of a calendar reform debate in the thirteenth century
    Astronomers and the calendar, 1290-1500
    The papal reform project of 1344/45 and its protagonists
    Church councils and the question of Easter in the fifteenth century
    The harvest of medieval calendar reform
    References

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