ABSTRACT
Because the title of this concluding chapter verges on the megalomaniac I want to begin with something quite specific and, in one sense, very modest. It is a kind of book. It is a kind of book which did exist before the appearance of the printing press, but in tiny numbers. The possibilities of mass production created by moveable type meant that this book was in effect reinvented to become, in later sixteenth-century England (and probably in the rest of Europe too), the most popular of all publications outside the Bible. It has been estimated that by the 1660s one family in three bought a copy every year, yet it is a publication which is hardly ever noticed by scholars of the early modern period.1 The book I am referring to is the humble almanac. The origins of the term almanac are obscure, but it seems likely that it derives from a Spanish Arabic word meaning a sundial.2 The first record of its appearance in England is in 1267 in Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus and Chaucer is the first writer to use the term in English, more than a century later, in his Treatise on the Astrolabe. Essentially, the almanac is a collection of tables for measuring time. The tables chart the movement of the heavenly bodies in the course of the year and the terrestial events which they influence, such as the movement of the titles. Alongside the almanac is
the calendar (or ‘kalendar’), which simply tabulates the months, weeks and days, including the saints’ days; almanacs always contain calendars, but a calendar might be issued without an almanac. Another close relation is the prognostication. This is a slightly different kind of production from the almanac, in that it is an astrological prediction of forthcoming events, but since its predictions are based upon the astronomical data supplied in the almanac its very existence is bound up with that of the almanac itself. Literally so in the print era, when almanac and prognostication often appeared as a single volume, with separate title pages but with signatures or page numbers running on. That format suggests a dependent relationship, but one in which the astrology is detachable from the astronomy; an optional extra as it were.
