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Time and metaphor : reading and writing the computus in the British Isles, 600-1400

University of British Columbia

“Time and Metaphor: Reading and Writing the Computus in the British Isles, 600–1400” takes up the question of the poetic and figurative substrate of the medieval time-reckoning practice known as computus. “Computus” refers both to the method of calculating the correct date of Easter and other variable Christian feast days and the textual materials produced by this method. These were, in the first instance, tables giving the correct date of Easter for some cyclical number of years, or the information needed in order for such calculations, but the term later came to be applied to texts dealing with the theory and practice of the Easter calculation which in the later medieval period took on an encyclopedic character. The problems involved in placing Easter at the appropriate time in the solar Roman calendar (its date depending upon the Hebrew lunar calendar) included discussions of such things as mathematics, astronomy, and the nature of the physical world and the heavens’ influence upon the earth. For this reason, these texts have often been conceived of as representing a kind of medieval science. This dissertation argues that it is more productive to read these texts for the insights they offer into the foundational metaphors through which medieval authors in England imagined the universe in which they lived. While ‘science’ remains a useful shorthand for these texts, a close examination of the conception of what the study of computus did and what its objects and purposes were reveal a mental habitus suited to a world quite alien from our own. Each chapter in this dissertation reads the work of English authors at a particular point in the development of English computistical thought (monastic thinkers and writers in chapters 2 through 4, and popular and scholastic writing in chapter 5) for how it exhibits these ideas of the universe. I trace a history of the foundations of computistical thought and its influence upon modes of thinking across many disparate domains, and address the nature of computus as a specifically medieval phenomenon.

Text

2024-09-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/66942

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/