Time is a slippery beast. You may believe otherwise, if you
live in today’s West. Here, the moments march lockstep in time with the news
ticker, Twitter feeds and the stock market bell—every event branded with a
number. The precision of industry disguises the artifice that is our experience
of time.
In the world of our ancient forbears, however, we had less
evidence of time’s passage. The seasons flowed one into another with each
year’s refrain, and the phases of the moon signaled the strength of the tides. When
those cultures saw fit to measure these intervals, they faced a panoply of
decisions in the face of the elements. As civilizations grew, they sometimes
saw fit to change those decisions and alter their measure of time. The
Renaissance saw at least one such change to fruition.
The calendar of the early Renaissance, the Julian calendar,
saw its origins in ancient Rome. It takes its name from Julius Caesar himself,
who implemented the new count of years. Rome’s previous calendar, the Calendar
of Numa, was a lunar calendar of twelve months. The total count of its days
amount to 355 in a year: 10.25 short of a full (tropical) year. To re-align the
system with a full orbit of the Sun, some years gained an extra month, which
compensated for the missing days of previous years.
In Caesar’s time, the Calendar of Numa fell out of sync
with the tropical year. Rome’s political system encouraged officials to insert
these ‘leap months’—called intercalary
months—at inappropriate times to extend their tenure. Caesar learned of Egypt’s
solar calendar during his campaign in Alexandria, and later set to integrate
the Egyptian system with the Roman lunar calendar.
The result—the Julian calendar—resembles today’s Gregorian
system closely. Caesar added days to the old Roman months to bring the total to
365 per year. The Julian calendar abolished the intercalary month, and instead
appended an intercalary day to
February in every fourth year. Today, we know these years as leap years. These
leap years served to compensate for the quarter-day drift between the 365-day
year and the true tropical year.
For over a millennium, the Western world aligned their lives
to the passing of the Julian months. But the Julian calendar held a flaw: the
tropical year is not 365.25 days in
length. It is somewhat shorter, about 265.24219 days. Over time, the seasons
drifted across the calendar. By the 16th century, in Pope Gregory
XIII’s reign, the seasons arrived ten days out of sync with their assigned
dates.
The inaccuracy of the Julian calendar made Catholic life
difficult. The Church aligned its festivals with the solstices and equinoxes,
echoing Pagan tradition. Solstices and equinoxes are astronomical phenomena,
produced by Earth’s axial tilt relative to the Sun at four points in its orbit.
The days are longest on the summer solstice, while the winter solstice marks
the year’s longest night, and the equinoxes see equal measures of day and
night. Since the Julian calendar no longer predicted Earth’s astronomical
position accurately, the Catholic Church could not hold Easter, Christmas or
other important holidays at the proper time.
When Gregory XIII established the aptly named Gregorian
Calendar by Papal bull in 1582, he implemented a few adjustments to the Julian
system. The most sophisticated involved the prediction of Easter, but the
change with which we are most familiar is the omission of one leap year every
century, excepting every fourth century. Most of Italy and much of Europe
quickly followed the Pope’s lead, while Protestant countries resisted the
change. Nonetheless, many peoples adopted this calendar far and wide over the
rest of the millennium—some by choice, some by the sword of European conquest.
Today, most of the world lives by Gregorian time.
While the modern calendar took shape in Gregorian times,
many differences remain between the keeping of Renaissance time and the keeping
of modern time. The common people in Italy measured the day by “Italian hours,”
counted from dawn, while astronomers used the Julian date, where the day began
at noon. The invention and improvement of mechanical clocks would eventually
change these measures. Join me next week, where I delve into these subjects in
Part II of “Telling Time in the Renaissance.”
Sources:
Julian Calendar, Wikipedia 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
Gregorian Calendar, Wikipedia 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
Roman Calendar, Wikipedia 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar
Hour, Wikipedia 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour
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