SOURCE: “The Problem of the Calendar,” in Time's Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England, UCL Press, 1998, pp. 31-44.

In the following excerpt, Poole examines the Julian calendar, its Gregorian reform, and the gradual acceptance of the reformed calendar in Protestant Europe.

Easter is a feast, not a planet. You do not determine it to hours, minutes and seconds.

Kepler

Since the start of the Christian era, the calendar has been one of the most fertile of all sources of theological controversy.¹ The calendar was never merely a system of calibrating the year, capable of being perfected, for there was no single agreed natural standard against which it could be measured out. Rather, there were several reference standards: solar (the year), lunar (the month), and terrestrial (the day). Onto the framework created from these incommensurable natural quantities was laid a cycle of feasts and festivals which were human...