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Scandalous Error - Calendar Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe (Hardcover)
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Scandalous Error - Calendar Reform and Calendrical Astronomy in Medieval Europe (Hardcover)
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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.
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