Refusing translation: the Gregorian calendar and early modern English writers.

Prescott, Anne Lake

ABSTRACT

When in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII announced his reformed calendar, English response was more intrigued than hostile, but opposition set in; it would be 1752 before England abandoned the Julian Calendar. For several generations the gap between the two calendars produced complaints about confusion in chronology. But makers of almanacs soon included dates from both systems; wits used the two calendars for clever conceits; and Protestants made sarcastic comments on Gregory's reform. Meditations on significant dates by the metaphysical poets John Beaumont and John Donne, moreover, acquire new meaning when read against English refusal to translate the Gregorian Calendar across the Channel.

In October 1582, thanks to Pope Gregory XIII and his bull 'Inter Gravissimas' that established the new calendar we call 'Gregorian', many Europeans went to bed on the fourth of that month and awoke on the fifteenth. They did so for scientific reasons (Julius Caesar's 'Julian' calendar had drifted off course) and liturgical (to track Easter, a moveable feast, Christians must get their astronomical ducks in a circle). The challenge is to reconcile the solar Julian count with the largely Jewish one, for Easter is related to Passover and hence to the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Since lunar and solar cycles are incommensurable, this takes much calculation and some compromise. The calendar thus offered several problems in translatio: from Jewish to Christian, from pagan to biblical, from lunar to solar, and eventually from Julian to Gregorian. For many years, though, the English refused this last translation.

Initial English reaction to Gregory's bull had been cheerful. On 21 December 1582 William Perse sends 'a Calendarium Gregorianum' to his brother as a New Year's present. On 19 November 1582 J. Lobbetius writes to Walsingham that 'The Pope has made a new calendar, in which he makes us skip this year full jump from the 4TH to the 13TH [he means 15TH] of October, and thus makes us 10 days older.' (1) A joke, but Lobbetius understands the implications, saying, 'I do not know if it is to make the solstice fall about Christmas, as it did formerly.' (In fact, thanks to retaining the Council of Nicea's date of 21 March for the vernal equinox, Gregory only came close.) Noting the Pope's fury at being told of a flaw in his new calendar, Lobbetius nevertheless advises that 'we follow the usage of this calendar as soon as it is certain and correct'. And even the dyspeptic astrologer John Harvey can calmly observe in his Discursive Probleme concerning Prophecies (1588) (2) that because Gregory's astronomers had calculated far into the future, they clearly disbelieved superstitious prophets of doom (R4r).

Not everybody thought Gregory's astronomers had the right answers. Robert Hues's several times reprinted Tractatus de globis et eorum usu (1594) cites Copernicus's calculations to show errors in the reformers' calculations (B[4.sup.V]), although he is not otherwise hostile. Nor is Robert Pont in his New Treatise of the Right Reckoning of the Yeares (Edinburgh, 1599), which doubts that 'Lilius in his new Kalendar' has the year's length quite right, though adding that Christians need not 'bee too much curious, concerning the observations of those Feastes', for the Bible does not encourage us to be 'superstitious' (H[3.sup.r]-[4.sup.r]). Some doubters offered alternatives. The preface to a 1591 almanac by 'J.D'. (John Dee? John Dade?) describes ameeting at which arguments over the Gregorian reform led to the consensus that a third system was needed; there follows a triple list of dates headed 'the common Kalendar', 'the Romane', and 'the true'. The 'true' assumes an equinox as it was in Jesus's time. Even those who doubted the new calendar's accuracy, however, nevertheless knew that the Julian was flawed. As one almanac-maker wrote in 1593, should the world last 22,646 years, and should the calendar 'remaine so long unreformed', midsummer would fall on the winter solstice; thus 'processe of yeeres' would 'breede no small alteration of tyme'.(3)

The government's response has been well described: the consultation with the astrologer John Dee, who had his own theories; the decision to import Gregory's calendar (there exists an unpublished proclamation on 28 April 1583 to that effect); opposition by the English bishops, probably worried that the secular arm would extend its calendrical reach, who pointed to potential social disruption and called Gregory the Antichrist; dashed hopes of reform in the seventeenth century; and in 1752, at long last, the switch to the Gregorian system.(4) It is easy to wonder at such recalcitrance, yet to lose ten (and by 1752 eleven) days is no small matter. Does one pay a full month's rent? What of astrology? In October 1582, as the moon seemingly skipped over Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries, those signs lost influence over knees, legs, feet, and head. Rather than repeating this story, I shall comment on some aspects of the earlier decades of English refusal--translatio as Protestant recusatio--first glancing at how almanac-makers dealt with two calendars and then showing how some writers exploited or perhaps deliberately ignored Gregory's innovation. (5) If the calendrical gap caused confusion and anxiety, it was also the site of fertile thought about how to count Father Time's feathers, of explicit wit or complaint, and sometimes of an implicit affirmation of (or reliance on) English difference.

Almanac-makers soon realized that those who visited much of the Continent, if only in imagination, had to move the date by ten days. If travelling between 1 January and 25 March they had to change the year as well, for the Pope had set 1 January as New Year's Day, whereas the English clung to 25 March, Lady Day, as the year's official start. Soon business smarts, intellectual curiosity, or an eye on Catholic readers led a few almanac-makers and commentators to gesture at the Gregorian Calendar._ They did so primarily by giving two sets of dates for that year's moveable feasts and other important times in the liturgical year. It is here that the calendrical gap is most visible and where it can produce thoughts on signifiers and signifieds and on days that might or might not, under different names, be the same. On occasion both date and day differed. In some years, that is, Gregorians in Rome or Mexico City would feast on roast lamb for Easter dinner while Julians in London or Boston were still pushing the baked haddock around their Lenten plates. Or the other way round. Some almanac-makers pondered the fact of a moveable gap as well as moveable feasts. Robert Westhawe's 1594 almanac first gives 'The difference betwixt our usuall Kalender' and the 'Reformed, used beyond Sea' and then remarks that the moveable feasts 'are this yeere all upon one and the selfe same day as they be with us' but with a different date, so that their May Day is 'xxi of Apryll after our accompt' (A2R). Years later, one of the almanacs named for the deceased Edward Pond has a similar comment. In 1601, says this London Almanack for the Yeare of our Lord Christ 1643, 'there was no difference, but in 1602 the Romanes kept their Easter 7 dayes before us; and in 1603 they kept their Easter 35 dayes, that is, 5 weekes before us' (A4R).

The first almanac I have seen that recognizes the new calendar is by William Farmer, a surgeon, who calculated it for Dublin in 1587, explaining on the title-page that this is

The common Almanacke [...] Whereunto is annexed, and diarily compared the new Kalender of the Romans, which is very pleasaunt, and also necessarie for all estates, whosoever that hath cause to travel, trade, or traffique into any Nation which hath already received this new Kalender: as wyll more playne appeare by the dayly use thereof. (Published London: Watkins and Roberts)

Farmer seems easy with the new calendar and, although he does not say so, his Catholic readers would have welcomed it. Under 'our common Kalender' he lists the 'Pascha Hebrorum', the 'Pascha, or Easter, after the auncient Fathers', and the 'Pascha Usitatum' (usual Easter). TheGregorian column lists 'Pascha Hebrorum', the 'Pascha Romanum. This is that Easter whiche the Romanes now celebrate', and the 'Pascha Usitatum. This Easter the Romanes have rejected'. Farmer's date for this last, reasonably enough, is zero. Other almanac-makers soon followed this pattern, some of the earliest being 'J.D.' for 1591, Weshawe for 1594 (the year by which Edmund Spenser patterns his Amoretti according to the Julian rules), and Gabriel Frende for 1595.

The double-calendar soon became common. Headings vary: 'The English account', says one common heading, which is paired with 'The Romish Account'--papal 'Romish', of course, not ancient Romish. Another set has the 'Old' and the 'Forrain'. Yet another has the 'Usuall' and 'Reformed' (there is an irony here, for it was the 'Reformed' Church in England that rejected the 'reformed' calendar; I have not seen anyone at the time remark on this, though). One almanac says, more elaborately, 'Julian or English, used in great Brittain' and 'Gregorian or Roman used beyond Sea'. A more historical set of headings reads 'The Julian, Sosigenian, or English account' and 'The Lilian, Gregorian, or Roman account', a satisfying recognition of scholars--Sosigenes and Alois Lilius--as well as of their rulers. Sometimes the Gregorian days and numbers are in Latin, as though to give thema learned but also alien and Catholic look, an impression occasionally increased by the use of comfortable blackletter for the English dates and the more recently imported Roman font for the foreign ones. Recognition of this difference may have accelerated if not multiculturalism, exactly, then a broader awareness of others on the part of the less sophisticated. There remains something sad--from an ecumenical perspective--about the wording of explanatory verses in Ponds Almanack for the Year of Our Lord Christ 1649 (Cambridge): 'Vermilion figures shew at Rome How much before our Easter theirs doth come' (A2V, emphasis added).

If after 1600 most almanac-makers thought it both profitable and responsible to give both calendars, comments on the Gregorian Calendar were sometimes more irritated or puzzled than they had been at first, although sometimes also amused. James I's avowal that 'he knows not his own age, for now his birthday removes ten days nearer him than it was before that change' is funny, although the context is fear of disorder: applying irrelevant law would destroy even 'Meum & tuum', says the king: compare 'the Gregorian Calendar', which 'destroys the old, and yet this new troubles all the Debts and Accounts of Traffick and Merchandise'. (7) Of course others could argue the reverse, as did Robert Vilvain in the diatribe that ends his A Compend of Chronography (1654):

Why then shal we stick stil in the Sa[n]ds and stand single or singular in evident error? Specialy sith by uniform conformity with them, the duple comput of stilo veteri & novo wil be cancelled or cashired, to the ineffable bene.t of common commerce in this commonwealth with forren Nations. (E[2.sup.r])

Not surprisingly, the militantly Protestant William Prynne did not like the new calendar at all, protesting in his scorching Looking-Glasse for All Lordly Prelates (1636) that bishops are setting up crucifixes and images, displaying altar cloths, allowing 'heathenish sports', giving the godly bad names such as 'Puritan', 'Magnifying Popish writings', and 'endeavoring to bring in the Gregorian account' (F[2.sup.R-V]). Prynne calls these 'Romish Innovations', for although Gregory had hoped to return the equinox to the time of Nicea and keep it there, accusations of 'novelty' figured regularly in Catholic polemics and Prynne wants to return the taunt. Less rigorous Protestants than Prynne, however, could sneer at Gregory's calendar. Jeremy Taylor, who held a see in Ireland, at least raises an interesting issue as he scoffs. Arguing against indulgences in his Dissuasive from Popery to the People of Ireland (Dublin, 1664), Taylor says that

You must also inquire and be rightly inform'd, whether an Indulgence granted upon a certain Festival will be valid, if the day be chang'd, (as they were all at once, by the Gregorian Calendar) or if you go into another Countrey, where the Feast is not kept the same day, as it happens in moveable Feasts, and on S. Bartholomews day, and some others. (M[4.sup.r])

Taylor does not admit that in England the centuries had likewise untied feasts from their ancient temporal mooring; perhaps he had mentally separated the Anglican calendar from a cyclic liturgical time in which days vary not only in memorial intensity but also in their spiritual nature. In any case, it is a more secular contempt for Gregorian slipperiness that energizes a derisive passage in Arthur Wilson's 1652 History of Great Britain. When the Catholic Archbishop Spalato came to England, writes Wilson in the language of astrology, 'he preaches, rails, and writes against Rome, (extolling the Protestant Religion) till he came to be Dean of Windsor', and then, disappointed in further hopes or guided by an altered fancy,

like a wandering Star, he goes Retrograde, placing himself again in the Roman Calendar: but he is made to reckon at Rome by the Gregorian account; And though he thought himself in a full Conjunction with the Stars there of the greatest Magnitude (having publickly recanted, and as bitterly reproached the Protestant Doctrine there, as he had exalted it here), yet the Inquisition had so strong an influence upon him, that it hindred the operation of it, for he died in Prison. (1652; 1653 edn, O3V)

Translating himself forward ten days, Spalato has regressed._

The calendrical gap can also confuse us by allowing the unwary to misdate events. A passage in Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King Charles (probably by PeterHeylyn, 1656) attempts to correct an earlier biographer. The man boasts of the 'especiall care he hath of his Temporalities (as his own word is) in assigning unto every action its own proper time', says Heylyn, but 'he fails us' when suggesting that Charles had heartlessly celebrated his marriage shortly after burying his father. The funeral on 7 May, Heylyn explains, came after the wedding solemnized in Paris, for in fact 'the Marriage was celebrated in Paris on the 11TH of May in the French Accompt, which following the Gregorian Calender anticipates ten daies in every month [...] in the new Style (or stylo novo, as they phrase it) which is the first day of the Moneth in the old Style and Accompt of England' (C5V). Modern scholars can sympathize.

Such considerations can suggest the cultural relativism that was often, in early modern theory, associated with climatic difference. In his Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), an investigation of 'commonly presumed truths', after remarking in his mellow fashion that calendrical differences are not 'derogatory unto the Advent or Passion of Christ', Sir Thomas Browne notes the 'absurdity in making common unto many Nations those considerations, whose verity is but particular unto some', for 'diversity of clime' has 'not onely overthrown the deductions of one Nation to another, but hath perturbed the observations of festivities and statary solemnities'. Most men know

that the Calenders of these computers, and the accounts of these dayes are very different; the Greeks differing from the Latins, and the Latins from each other; the one observing the Julian or ancient account, as great Britaine and part of Germany; the other adhering to the Gregorian or new account, as Italy, France, Spaine, and the united Provinces of the Netherlands [...] yet in these severall calculations, the same events seeme true, and men with equall opinion of verity, expect and confesse a confirmation from them both. Whereby is evident the Oraculous authority of tradition, and the easie seduction of men, neither enquiring into the verity of their substance, nor reforming upon repugnance of circumstance.

And thus may diverse easily be mistaken who superstitiously observe certaine times, or set downe unto themselves an observation of unfortunatemonths, or dayes, or howres. (Nn[1.sup.V], Nn[3.sup.V]-Oo[1.sup.V])

Brown is willing to live without translated ('deducted') calendars because he believes them peculiar to their 'clime'. He rejects only superstition. What he thinks superstition, though, others thought significant: if major feasts are celebrated hodie--today, as Catholic rites say far more often than does the Book of Common Prayer--and if that day is spiritually special (a view Puritans dismissed as quasi-magical), then we should have the right hodie.

An 'undeducted' calendar can inspire conceits: Thomas Fuller's Holy State (1642) includes a 'character' of 'The Prince or Heir apparent to the Crown'. So ideal is he, so pious and yet so politically astute, that just as 'The Gregorian account goes ten dayes before the computation of the English calendar', so the 'capacity of Princes goes as many years before private mens of the same age' (Uu[4.sup.V]). As a rhetorical flourish, this is almost embarrassing, although the real heir was to demonstrate various sorts of 'capacity' as Charles II. But what of his father? The period's oddest calendrical pirouette must be an epigram on Charles I's execution in Robert Vilvain's Enchiridium epigrammatum (1654). It is a 'chronogram', the rule for which requires that letters able to double as Roman-numerals add up to a date: 'Ter deno Jani, labensRex Sole cadente Carolus exutus solio sceptroque secure est', which Vilvain translates as 'King Charls on Janus thirtieth, when Sun declined; Of Throne and Scepter was by th' Ax deprived' (Aa[3.sup.R]). Counting 'u' as 'v', we have 'DDCCCCLLLLXXVVVVVIII. 1648'. So far, so Julian. What if we prefer Gregory's system? No problem. The margin notes that changing secure to securi (the alternative ablative) 'makes one yeer more 1649 according to forren Accompt'. Right. Wit effects the translation from Julian to Gregorian, from text to margin, but only by playing with the Latin for 'axe'. After 1660 it would have been prudent to be less clever and more dismayed.

More curious than clever exploitations of an untranslated Gregorian Calendar are poems that depend on ignoring it.

As John Donne struggled to find his way from the Catholicism of his birth into the Church of England, he would have had to notice calendrical disputes. Liturgically minded, he might also have thought that the most important calendar is neither Julian nor Gregorian but the pattern of feast and fast that John Cosin praises in his 1627 Collection of Private Devotions; or, The Houres of Prayer. The Church, Cosin says, begins her year with Advent,

herein differing from all other Accounts @ Revolutions of Time whatsoever. And it is to let the world know, that she neither numbreth her dayes, nor measureth her seasons so much by the motion of the Sunne, as by the Course of her Saviour, beginning and continuing on the yeere with Him, who being the true Sun of Righteousnesse beginneth now to rise upon the World. (N[3.sup.R-V])

In Christ, as St Paul might have said of the calendar, there is neither mortal moon nor mortal sun. Whatever Donne's early thoughts on such matters, though, he came to despise the Gregorian Calendar, although the vigour of his contempt suggests residual worry. His Ignatius his Conclave (1611) imagines Ignatius and other luminaries networking in hell. Since Lucifer does not care whether the Earth moves or not, Ignatius tells Copernicus, hell wants Clavius, one architect of the new calendar, as its astronomer:

Hee onely can be called the Author of all contentions, and schoole-combats in this cause; and no greater profit can bee hoped forherein, but that for such brabbles, more necessarie matters bee neglected. And yet not onely for this is our Clavius to bee honoured, but for the great paines also which hee tooke in the Gregorian Calender, by which both the peace of the Church, & Civill businesses have been eeg regiously troubled: nor hath heaven it selfe escaped his violence, but hath ever since obeied his apointments: so that S. Stephen, John Baptist, & all the rest,which have bin commanded to worke miracles at certain appointed daies, where their Reliques are preserved, do not now attend till the day come, as they were accustomed, but are awaked ten daies sooner, and constrained by him to come downe from heaven to do that businesse.

Donne plays the Gregorian Calendar for laughs, but as in Taylor's semi-satirical question concerning dates and indulgences, the issue is real, for the Protestant convert here performs another conversion, changing, through parody, a liturgical and Catholic understanding of saints into something more sceptical of the 'Stephen-ness' of St Stephen's Day (26 December), its quidditas. Gregory's reform invited such queries: does translating a feast's date translate its mana? Yet Gregory's aim had been to restore time, tomake the saints get up punctually and not slug abed for ten days because Sosigenes had miscalculated the solar year for Caesar.

Years later, in a sermon of 3 April 1625 on Psalm 11. 3 ('If the Foundations be Destroyed, what can the righteous do?'), Donne argues that once we agree to agree on the foundation, our opponents might then redefine and expand that 'foundation'. Thus 'when every thing must be called Foundation, we shall never knowe where to stop, where to consist'. Even if we were to agree on, say, transubstantiation and

their Purgatorie Fires, and their Mythologie, and Poetrie, their apparitions of Soules and Spirits, they would binde us to their Mathematiques too, and they would not let us bee B[3.sup.R-V]; ed. by T. S. Healy, SJ, an edition of the English and Latin texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 19. Healy's note on Clavius, p. 110, cites a French Jesuit's insistence that saints retained their powers after the ten-day shift. saved, except wee would reforme our Almanackes to their tenne dayes, and reforme our Clockes to their foure and twentie: for who can tell when there is an ende of Articles of Faith, in an Arbitrarie, and in an Occasionall Religion?_

Give these people ten days and they'll take the Gospel. That may be why two poems by Donne depend on not translating the Gregorian Calendar. One is 'A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day', a poem on the shock of loss.(11)

St Lucy's Day, 13 December, is the shortest day in the old calendar, when the sun enters Capricorn (or, as this poem puts it, 'to the Goat is runne'). The paradox is that although 'Lucy' means light, her day comes at 'the yeares midnight' when she 'scarce seven houres herself unmaskes' and 'The Sunne is spent'. Donne is the very epitaph, he says, of all this lack, and yet he is 're-begot Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not', being now the 'grave Of all, that's nothing'. The new world, says the bereft speaker, will start in spring (at the equinox? or on Lady Day?). This powerful conceit works best if 13 December in fact coincides with the winter solstice. In much of Europe, though, Lucy retained more of her lumens than the Julian Calendar had allowed her, for in the reformed calendar her feast precedes the solstice by about ten days. Donne could turn any date into paradox, but this poem's particular line of thought would need modifying had England followed Gregory. Indeed, when France adopted the new calendar it was too late to drop days in October, so the year jumped from 9 to 20 December, meaning that Lucy, as one modern scholar says, was the 'reform's true loser'.__ Donne's paradoxical negatives are even more poignant if one remembers that across the Channel, if only for one year, she had become--nothing.

The other poem is 'Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day' (1608).(13) The poemlooks theologically innocuous, although Donne would have known of patristic arguments over whether it was the Passion or the Resurrection that fell on the Annunciation and how this relates to Christ's final Passover. (14) Donne's body must fast, he says--this is a Friday in Lent--but his soul eats twice. Today Christ makes a double circle: as man and God, arriving and leaving, doubly nothing and yet all, not yet alive and yet dead, his mother at fifteen and fifty both 'receiver' and 'legacie'. This day thus abridges Christ's story from Ave to Consummatum est. The Church does well by seldom yet sometimes joining these days. Just as we guide ourselves not by an (absent) northern star but by the only seemingly .xed nearby star that shows where the true pole is, so we can know God by the Church, who 'by letting these daies joyne, hath shown Death and conception in mankinde is one'. Thus Christ's 'imitating Spouse' joins 'Manhoods extremes' of coming and leaving. This day, concludes Donne, has engrossed such a store that he can now 'retaile' it every day of his life.

Helen Gardner's note to this poem expresses surprise that Donne ignores the old tradition (she cites the medieval Golden Legend) that the first Good Friday fell on 25 March, but perhaps Donne knew too much Church history to be confident about this--and would have thought The Golden Legend an unreliable source. It is the case that the Anglican Good Friday fell on Lady Day in 1608, and also that Anglicans and Roman Catholics commemorated the Crucifixion on the same Friday that year, even if dating the day differently. But only in England did the Crucifixion and Annunciation fall on 25 March; the Gregorian Easter fell on 4 April, and thus in 1608 Donne's is an Anglican, not Roman, paradox. Donne must have known this: his poem is, if not a theological confirmation of his conversion, then a geopolitical affirmation of Englishness with a frisson possible, that year, only at home. We know God by his Church--but which? Rome and Canterbury, Catholics and Protestants, on occasion celebrate Lady Day on Good Friday, but this year it is the Church of England by which Donne calculates true north. In a clever essay Theresa DiPasquale argues that this poem, written seven years before his ordination as an Anglican priest, sets up a feminine and even Catholic trinity (Mary, soul, and Church) against the Protestant patriarch James I. (15) This is an engaging suggestion, although James would welcome Donne's calendrical assumptions. It is also true, as DiPasquale astutely remarks, that the Spouse's identity is not here in question (as it is in Donne's third Satire), yet the calendrical conceit itself is a reminder that in only one calendar, and that not the Pope's, is this particular Good Friday also Mary's day. It is hence also a reminder that Christians disagreed as to the Bride's whereabouts. The stress on the feminine may be Catholic; the calendrical wit points away from Rome. Donne's mind was never simple: the author of anti-Catholic satire was also alive to the power of the Catholic liturgy and to the resonance of saints' days dropped from the Anglican calendar.(16)

Donne was not the only writer in whom the coincidence of two dates inspired meditation and conceits--or flattery. The day before Lady Day in 1611 Bishop Lancelot Andrewes delivered a sermon before James I 'On the 24. of March last, being', as the title-page says, Easter and 'also the day of the Beginning of His Majesties most Gracious Reigne'. Andrewes recalls how Christ, the stone that the builders rejected, is now the cornerstone where Jew and Gentile, male and female, and slave and free meet. David, too, was a cornerstone, Andrewes continues, and so is James:

Because (as this yeere falleth out) upon one day, (and Hic est dies, This is the day) Wee have in one a memorial of two benefits; of our Saviours exalting, by his Resurrection: and of our Soveraignes exalting, and making Head of this Kingdome. Both, lighting so together, we were (as mee thought) so to remember the one, that we left not the other out [. . .] and so wee rejoice and render thankes to God for both: For the Lord Christ, and for the Lords Christ, under one.(17)

As to the cause of this double memorial, Andrewes is unclear: the year 'falleth out' and both days 'light' together, as though this were mere chance, yet the wordplay on 'Lord Christ' and the 'Lord's Christ' hints at Providence. That the double day offers a 'memorial' and not something more, however, may parallel an awareness that the calendrical coincidence depends on human arrangements. Only in the Julian Calendar would the two days coincide, although if Gregory had made James ten days older, one could argue that he had also relocated his accession from 24 March 1602 to 3 April 1603. That year Easter fell on the same actual day in both calendars, so the conceit would still work, albeit without the pleasant Julian fact that the eve of Lady Day is also a sort of cornerstone uniting old and new years.

Andrewes had company in calendrical flattery. Sir Arthur Gorges wrote the king a New Year's poem 'alluding to the time that hee Was proclaimed here in England 24th March'. Although this 'new Yeares guift' is given, as usual, on 1 January, Gorges notes that James began his reign just as 'our styled yeare did end'. Time has changed 'the aged yeare', he says loyally, but may he 'change not your Royall race Till tyme noe more shalbee'. Gorges' allusion to 'our styled yeare' means 'the year we English officially start on 25 March and not, like almanacs and the new calendar (stylo novo), on 1 January'. He thus offers a traditional New Year's Day gift on 1 January that relies for its wit on making Lady Day the start of 'our' year.(18) Sir John Beaumont adopts the same obsequious conceit for a poem printed with his posthumous Bosworth-Field with a Taste of the Variety of Other Poems (1629). The poem, 'On the Anniversary day of his Majesties reigne over England, March the 24. written at the beginning of his twentieth yeere', exclaims improbably that on the following day the sun, now free of winter's clouds, will 'see his Equinoctiall point againe' but, dazzled by James, would wish to 'leave the Zodiake, and desire To dwell forever with our Northerne .re' (H[5.sup.R]). Beaumont assumes, for the moment, that the truest vernal equinox is neither Nicea's 21 March nor the actual astronomical one. His equinox is translated, so to speak, to what one ancient tradition thought its proper place on Lady Day.

Beaumont continued to exploit the calendar; another poem in Bosworth-Field makes a clever sequel to Donne's poem on Lady Day: 'Upon the two great Feasts of the Annunciation and Resurrection falling on the dame day, March 25'. (19) They did so fall that year--in England. Like Donne, Beaumont relates this temporal correspondence to geography as well as to time, noting that it 'sweetly' combines 'Two Hemispheres in th' Equinoctiall line', one rendering the Word speechless and 'debasing God to earthly paine, | The other raising man to endlesse raigne' as God's light grows beyond eclipse and darkness. If on Lady Day Christ lowers himself into Mary's womb, on Easter he rises, and this year on the same day. Beaumont is cheating again, for the actual equinox had come and gone about two weeks earlier and the Church's notional one had happened on 21 March. Some, though, might reply that 25 March had been the date of the vernal equinox in the time of Christ, or of God's first equinox at the Creation; if so, then this poem's understanding of the calendar is truer than that of Gregory's or Nicea's astronomers. Wherever the Gregorian Calendar had been adopted, though, Easter that year was on 4 April. The conceit is possible on both sides of the Channel, but not in the same year; in this, as in so much, wit itself is hard to translate across water._

Eventually Britain sent eleven days into oblivion and followed Gregory's 'account'. Much of the planet was to do the same. That uniformity, literally visible as televised celebrations of 1 January 2000 circled the globe, has been useful for commerce and communication. Few in England now mourn the Julian Calendar. For a while, though, English rejection of papist novelty and fear of disruption had provided, along with inconvenience and occasional embarrassment, a chance for cleverness and a sharpened insight into cultural difference. Not translating can be almost as valuable as having everyone on the same page.

(1) Calendar of State Papers Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1581-1590, ed. by Robert Lemon (London, 1865), ii, 79; Calendar of State Papers Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, May-December 1582, ed. by Arthur John Butler (London, 1909), p. 455.

(2) The place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.

(3) James Carre, An Almanacke [...] for 1593, B4R; the joke was going around: Jerome Delatour, 'Noel le 15 decembre: la reception du calendrier gregorien en France (1582)', in Construire le temps: normes et usages chronologiques du Moyen Age a l'epoque contemporaine, ed. by Marie-Clotilde Hubert (Geneva: Droz, 2004), pp. 369-416, quotes an Advertissement of 14 November 1582: as time proceeds 'Noel seroit en plein coeur d'este, a scavoir en cent octante trois fois six vingt ans, qui font 21960, et la Sainct Jehan en plein coeur d'hyver' [Christmas would be in midsummer, that is in 183 x 6 x 20 years, which makes 21960, and St John's Day would be in midwinter'] (p. 395). Nathanial Eaton, Meno-Ezeologia; or, A Treatise of Moneths and Years (1657), says the same (C[4.sup.V]).

(4) The proclamation, listed in the CSP Domestic [...] Elizabeth, ii, 107, promises a calendar 'to accord [w.sup.TH] other countries next hereto adjoyninge beyond the seas'.

(5) See Gregorian Reform of the Calendar, ed. by G. V. Coyne, M. A. Hoskin, and O. Pederson (Vatican: Pontificia Academia Scientarum, 1983); David Ewing Duncan, Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year (New York: Avon, 1998); Stephen C. Mc- Cluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Poole, Time's Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London: University College London, 1998); Duncan Steel's Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar (New York: Wiley, 2000); and Max Engammare, L'Ordre du temps: l'invention de la ponctualite au XVIE siecle (Geneva: Droz, 2004).

(6) Frederic J. Baumgartner, 'Popes,Astrologers, and EarlyModernCalendarReform', in History Has Many Voices, ed. by Lee Palmer Wandel (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 2003), pp. 41-56, estimates that soon 75% summarized both calendars. Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500-1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), ignores the matter, but see Alison Anne Chapman, 'Reforming Time: Calendars and Almanacs in Early Modern England' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996).

(7) Sir William Sanderson, A Compleat History of [. . .] Mary Queen of Scotland, and of [...] James the Sixth (1656), Bbb[1.sup.V].

(8) Greg Semenza reminds me of Milton's scoff in Eikonoklastes (1649): 'if the People resolve to take [Charles I] Sainted [...] I shall suspect thir Calendar more then the Gregorian' (Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols in 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), iii, ed. by Merritt Hughes (1962), 343.

(9) B[3.sup.r-v]; ed. by T. S. Healy, SJ, an edition of the English and Latin texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 19. Healy's note on Clavius, p. 110, cites a French Jesuit's insistence that saints retained their powers after the ten-day shift.

(10) John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels, ed. by Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1967), pp. 81-82.

(11) Complete English Poems, ed. by C. A. Patrides (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 90-92. I ignore Spenser and Shakespeare,whose calendricalmanipulationsseveral scholars, includingme, explore.

(12) Delatour, p. 376: 'Elle fut la vraie perdante de la reforme'.

(13) John Donne, Divine Poems, ed. byHelenGardner (Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1959), pp. 29-30.

(14) Georges Declercq, Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).

(15) Theresa DiPasquale, '"Shee sees," "She's seen," and she "hath shown": The Feminine Trinity in "Upon the Annunciation and Passion"', John Donne Journal (forthcoming).

(16) See, for example, Clarence Miller, 'Donne's "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day" and the Nocturns of Matins', Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), 77-86, and Peter deSa Wiggins, Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 101-11. Chapman, pp. 185-88, shows how Donne relates his body to the [Julian, she might add] calendar.

(17) A Sermon Preached before his Majestie at White-Hall (1611), A[3.sup.r-v].

(18) Poems, ed. by Helen E. Sandison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 126.

(19) E5V-E6R; the Gregorian Easter fell on 4 April. Fuller's Worthies (1662) sceptically cites the prophecy that 'When our Lady falls in our Lords lap Then let England beware a mishap'.When Lady Day falls on Easter, the Virgin, 'forti.ed by her Sons assistance', will punish England for 'abolishing her Adoration' (M2R).

(20) Compare Herbert on his Good Friday birthday: 'Cum tu, Christe, cadis, nascor' ['as you die, Christ, I am born'] (The Latin Poetry of George Herbert, trans. by Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1965), p. 164).

ANNE LAKE PRESCOTT Barnard College, New York