Abstract
The Gregorian calendar reform of 1582, which provides the basis for the present-day Western civil calendar, has often been portrayed as a triumph of early modern scientific culture and an expression of papal ambition in the wake of the Counter-Reformation. Much less attention has been paid to our calendar’s intellectual and material roots in the European Middle Ages, when the reckoning of time by means of calendrical cycles was a topic of central importance to education and learned culture. For centuries prior to the Gregorian reform, astronomers, mathematicians, theologians, and even Church councils had been debating the necessity of improving or emending the existing ecclesiastical calendar, which throughout the Middle Ages kept growing out of sync with the astronomical phenomena at an alarming pace. Scandalous Error uses a broad base of sources, many of them unpublished or previously unknown, to paint the first full-scale survey of the medieval debate surrounding the calendar and its astronomical underpinnings.
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