SOURCE: “Chronology and Cosmology: A German Volkskalendar of the Fifteenth Century,” in Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LVII, No. 2, Winter, 1996, pp. 224-65.

In the following excerpt, Brévart analyzes fifteenth century manuscripts of a Volkskalendar—a collection of astronomical, seasonal, and biographical data.

In 1946, the Princeton University Library acquired a group of fifty-eight Western European medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from the Grenville Kane Collection.¹ Among them was a bound manuscript written in German and consisting of twenty-one parchment leaves measuring 19 x 14 centimeters, with approximately thirty lines to a page. According to a sheet of paper attached to the binding, the manuscript dates to the fifteenth century, and was “probably compiled about 1404.” On fol. 21r the colophon indicates that the scribe who copied the Princeton manuscript completed his work on 19 February 1435.²

The inventory of the Kane Collection declared that the manuscript was “founded on Sacrobosco,” a thirteenth-century astronomer, “but...