Andreas Nolthius'sAlmanachfor 1575

Abstract

1 . IntroductionAccording to a little calendar, or Almanack, printed for the year 1575, August 1440 was a memorable month, as the art of printing was invented in Strasbourg, and later improved at Mainz (Figure 1). Printing had become an invention whose significance was well-acknowledged by that time, and indeed, numerous claims had been made for its origin and inventor.1 This Almanack was a form of calendar - an annual calendar - that came into its own after the advent of printing. Indeed, one of the earliest things that Gutenberg printed, apart from the Bible, was a Latin calendar for the year 1457, listing medical advice for each month.2 This was a single-sheet calendar, a format followed by many fifteenth-century printers.3 Because these calendars listed auspicious and inauspicious days for bloodletting or taking medicines for the following year on a single sheet of paper, they were called Lasbrief, Lastafel, Almanack or, from the way it was used, a wall calendar.4 From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, annual calendars were also issued as small booklets, taking up the same amount of paper as the single-sheet calendars.5 These were called, also, an Almanack, Lassbuchlein or B auernka lender.6 The Almanack for 1 575 was thus a booklet of a typical name and size of its kind (page size 10.5 x 7.3 cm, 14 pages). It was compiled by Andreas Nolthius, mathematicus, who also issued a prognostication for the same year.7 Though it would be rash to claim discontinuity with manuscript culture, the printing press enabled the development of a rich variety of formats, sizes and forms of calendars.8 Annual calendars, in particular, were cheap enough to be affordable by a large number of people and could readily be discarded after use. Given their ephemeral nature, such calendars often survive only as fragments between bindings, as shown in Figure 2. In this paper, I focus on Nolthius's booklet calendar for the year 1575, and by placing it into its context, I hope to highlight the importance of calendars as one of the most popular and widespread forms in which astronomical information was made available to a large number of people in early modern Europe.Nolthius's Almanack for 1575, a copy of which is now in Cambridge University Library, was published in Erfurt in 1574. 9 Its content may somewhat artificially be divided into four elements: calendrical, astronomical, medical and historical. After placing these elements of Nolthius's Almanack within the context of earlier and contemporary calendars, I will discuss the possible audience of this kind of annual calendar. I hope to show the importance of this genre of publications for the history of astronomy, since it was astronomy that underpinned the various pieces of information in these calendars, such as Easter and other movable feasts, chronology, planetary positions (e.g. conjunctions and eclipses), and their astrological and meteorological significance, which in turn had medical implications.2. CalendricalCalendars may be divided into perpetual or annual ones. The most typical perpetual calendar known in the late Middle Ages was that of the Book of Hours. The Book of Hours normally contained a calendar, prayers for the canonical hours of the day, together with prayers to the Virgin Mary and for the dead.10 It was compiled for the daily devotion of the laity and was based on the divine office said by priests. Annual calendars carried over several conventions from such perpetual calendars. As in the case of the Book of Hours at Trinity College Cambridge (Figure 3), in a perpetual calendar each day of the month was marked by a dominical letter (A to G), a golden number (I to XIX) and a saint's name. The dominical letters indicate the days on which Sunday falls.11 Starting with the first of January as 'a', the first seven letters of the alphabet are iteratively assigned to subsequent days (with 29 February left blank). Sundays could then be specified each year by one of these dominical letters (except for leap years when two letters were used). …