The illustrations used in this study come from Flanders and other northern regions during the late middle ages. The motif is 'labours of the months' as a seasonal cycle, more or less as known in Roman times, but especially as the 'labours' reappear and are reconceived in the sixteenth century. One of the artists to whom the author gives much attention is Simon Bening (A.D.1483-1561).
As the year unfolds in illustrations of calendars, each season has its own character and concerns. Sometimes emblems of zodiacal signs accompany particular months, for example April with Taurus, the Bull, but usually not. Often there are little verses in Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, English; and it is fun, not occupations or duties about which these verses are intended to catch the imagination.
There are no significant religious interests in the illustrations of calendars. Authority figures are rare, and there is little giving or obeying orders, little coercion or resentment. Rather, it is a life of dignity and fulfilment without drudgery. The whole community is at work
or at play without pressure or constraint, humiliation or fear, disease or pain. There is decent poverty but no desperation. One aspect of ordinary life which stands out is that men and women work side by side in everything.
Masters and men all work on the land or in the stables. Grain is planted and grown and harvested, bread is baked and cut for eating, vines are tended. But not peas, beans, or cabbage, and not barley or hops for beer, nor apples for cider. There is barrel making, a gigantic
crane, a gigantic screw-press, a pulley for hoisting hay. Thus, I don't
know how the author can say that there is "scarcely a hint of trade and commerce".
Small but vivid scenes were added to borders of some calendars which display wine casks and firewood on river barges brought to a city gate, grain ground into flour in water mills on a river and those mills are secured beneath the arches of a bridge, sheep and oxen plodding to market, sacks of goods on wheelbarrows or pulled on sleds, officials assessing goods for custom. In the margin of one calendar illustration (figure 5-3) is a wagon delivering hay in a city street which the author
believes would be rare, not recognising that there are still many city streets in France, Germany, and Italy where one may observe this today (cities having grown up around the barns, but the farming work continues).
Other scenes appear concerning the ages of men and their stages of life,
for example children at their games and sometimes children at work with their parents; dance and musical instruments; archery and bowls; hunting and hawking. Farmwork makes heavy demands, but workers in these
illustrations find time for flirting in the hayfield.
Why were these calendars made with such extensive illustrations? There was an interest to which the craftsmen responded. Apparently, it was expected that customers had average tastes and that the market was international. Custom-made books for individuals or for a particular family were rare, though a few have become famous today. Even those very costly books made for one patron may actually have been sold to another, a great distance away, and with a new coat-of-arms added if the
price were right.
The title of this book may invite some readers to expect an analysis of the making and using of calenders, a study of computus. That word and the scientific work it requires, however, are avoided in this book, and the author says about the reckoning of times: "Quite obviously, this is not work for the faint hearted or the mathematically challenged." (220)
There is a useful introduction to this necessary basis for calendars in the Appendix, "The Calendar Page Decoded", which at least mentions all those columns of numerals and letters which were always found to the left side of the numbers indicating days of the month. Speaking about "Golden Numbers", that is, weekdays and how they shifted from year to year, she adds that "Most readers must have expected to find them on the
page, and been dimly aware of their importance, while lacking the ability to release the power of these elegant enigmas." For this, one must turn to the works of Ginzel, Krusch, Cheney, Jones, or Stevens (none of whom are cited).
The book is well-organised, well-written, and is a pleasant tour of the artwork of calendars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with numerous selections from other periods. Illustrations are many, mostly black and white, though eight colour plates are found between pages 56 and 57. Numbering of figures is by chapter, thus 1-1, 1-2, 1-3 et seq. and 2-1, 2-2, 2-3 etc. But colour plates retain the same numbering while placed out of sequence. Notes and references are at the end of each chapter, with a bibliography and index at the end--quite useful.