The Medieval Year: Seventh Day before the Kalends of August, AD 1224

Otherwise known as Friday, July 26th, (eight hundred years before) 2024.

This is the first post in The Medieval Year, a new weekly feature of the Via Mediaevalis newsletter. I hope you enjoy it!

Societies of the Middle Ages expressed the beauty, joy, and drama of the yearly cycle through delightful works of calendrical art. These illustrations—often homely, sometimes splendid, and always thought-provoking—decorated the calendars that formed an important part of many medieval books. Calendars of the Middle Ages are a fascinating subject in themselves; their method of codifying and displaying the days, weeks, and months of the astronomical year is very different from the system that we’re accustomed to.

Future posts in this series will discuss the rationale behind medieval calendars and explain how to read them, but my primary purpose is to show you some of the calendrical artwork that I find in old manuscripts, and to comment on its relation to the annual cycle of bodily and spiritual life in the medieval world. As you will see below, these calendars are actually a compelling icon of the united self: in one coherent artistic creation, labors required to sustain the body are joined to religious celebrations that nourish the spirit. They are yet another example of the personal, social, and cosmic wholeness that permeated medieval culture and that I try to share with you through this newsletter.

Sharing images like these, however, doesn’t require a full-length essay, and in any case, I want the artwork to take center stage. Thus, installments of The Medieval Year will be brief. I’ll send them out every Friday, and the two weekly essays will now arrive on Tuesday and Sunday instead of Wednesday and Sunday. These brief posts will give us an opportunity to appreciate illustrations created over five centuries ago, reflect on the basic tasks and rhythms of medieval life, and follow the medieval year as we make our way through the modern year.

Today’s piece is the calendar page for July in a late-fifteenth-century devotional book known as the Hours of Henry VIII, because England’s King Henry VIII supposedly owned it at one point. (There’s no solid evidence for this, and it seems unlikely to me.) The calendrical illustrations in this book are superb productions from the workshop of Jean Poyet, a French artist with a special genius for color, composition, and perspective.

The lower section of the page is the calendar for July. The Latin words, written next to the numbers and letters that mark the days, identify the saint celebrated on that day, with red or blue ink used for eminent saints such as Anne (the mother of the Virgin Mary) and the apostle known as James the Greater.

The upper section depicts important labors occurring in July, in the region where the book was produced.

The task at hand is the harvesting of ripe grain. The laborers, some more willing than others to prioritize modesty over staying cool, are cutting stalks of wheat with sickles and arranging them in bundles. Only one of them is fortunate enough to have a wide-brimmed hat, and the man taking a water break (or small-beer break) proves that people did indeed have ways of transporting liquids before the invention of plastic bottles.

The painting contains some lovely details: the food and drink in the center foreground is like a still life around which the action revolves; the shadows of tree trunks in the top right lend a note of realism and tranquility; the bright whites and bold reddish hues of the workers contrast with the yellow, green, and blue earth tones of the natural environment; and the path of stubble leads gracefully into the idyllic landscape in the background.

Overall, Poyet managed to beautifully convey something that I have experienced firsthand: the rural labors of summer are a mysterious blend of physical exhaustion and spiritual rest.