A New Mnemonic for the Date of Easter

Abstract

For obvious reasons, the need to determine the date of Easter each year with precision has occupied British clergy from Bede and before. One result was a proliferation of short mnemonic poems rendering a rule-of-thumb computus for this essential calculation.1 A New Index of Middle English Verse (NIMEV) lists twenty-three versions of these.2 Unsurprisingly, examples in Latin exist also, sometimes in combination with the verses in Middle English.3 MS Q.II.6, an almost unknown manuscript produced in East Anglia ca. 1320–1330, now in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial in Spain, contains a Middle English Easter mnemonic thus far neither published nor cited. Only Lucy Freeman Sandler has discussed this manuscript, but as an art historian her chief concern was the many splendid images it contains.4 She does not mention the presence of the little mnemonic poem: