ABSTRACT

Calendars represent an important arena in which religion and science have historically operated fruitfully together. Calendars typically incorporate both scientific material, such as the motions of the sun and moon, and religious concerns, such as the proper celebration of religious festivals. Because temporality is an element essential to many religious practices, properly understanding the functioning of the regular natural processes used to mark time becomes an essential ingredient in the creation of a calendar. We are not talking here about the physical object of a calendar, though that is part of the regulation and promotion of a calendrical system. Our subject is the calendar as a theoretical construct: the periodic natural phenomena used to mark time and the points in time that are set down as being important to the culture that uses the calendar. This analysis will focus only on selective aspects of the calendars of Rome and Christian Europe (the latter of which eventually became the most commonly used calendar in the world), but similar remarks apply to the calendars of many different cultures of many different periods.