The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser's English Calendar

Abstract

Oddly enough, despite its title, Edmund Spenser's first work, The Shepheardes Calender, Conteyning TweluexEglogues Proportionable to the Twelue Monethes (1579), has not been adequately examined as a calendar, a highly politicized reorganization of annual time published during an era obsessed with time and forms of time reckoning. The reason for this gap in criticism of The Shepheardes Calender lies in the nature of our experience with calendrical time, specifically in the calendar's ability to naturalize a given ideological or political freight-such as a certain set of religious rituals-by incorporating it into the fabric of everyday life. We typically experience the annual calendar as simply a neutral temporal framework, as one of the unquestioned furnishings of quotidian existence. The calendar, however, governs behavior by synchronizing various forms of practical observance-Sunday worship, a Friday afternoon drink, and spring cleaning. Thus, instituting a new calendar is a radical gesture, as registered by the fact that three of the major political revolutions of the modern age-French, Chinese, and Bolshevik-established a new calendar in order to make the experience of time itself serve the