CALAIS, JEAN DE
(fl. early 15th c.). A poem of some 410 lines in the Jardin de plaisance, Calais’s
Lamentations is a series of dialogues that a certain Jehan holds with Reason and Fortune.
The protagonist, hiding in a monastery from the persecution of the authorities, is
abandoned by all save his faithful wife. His only crime was to have loved his king.
Reason encourages him and Fortune assures him that the real cause of his suffering was
that he followed foolish counsel. Droz and Piaget have tentatively identified the Jehan of
the poem with Jean de Calais, a rich Parisian bourgeois who in 1430, during the English
occupation, participated in a plot against Henry VI, favoring the return of Charles VII
(the so-called conjuration dauphinoise). The plot was discovered and several persons
were arrested and executed. Jean was liberated upon payment of a large sum of money.
The Jean de Calais mentioned by Villon (Testament 173) is another person.
Peter F.Dembowski
Calais, Jean de. Lamentations. In Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique. Reproduction en
fac-similé de l’edition publiée par Antoine Vérard vers 1501. Paris: Didot, 1910, f. 136v°-139r°.
[text.]
Droz, Eugénie, and Arthur Piaget. Introduction et notes. Paris: Champion, 1925, pp. 260–61
[Commentary on 1910 ed.]
Longnon, Auguste. Paris pendant l’occupation anglaise (1420–1436): documents extraits de la
chancellerie de France. Paris: Champion, 1878, pp. 301–08.
CALENDAR, LITURGICAL
. “Calendar” has three distinct meanings. In the broadest sense, it refers to the
astronomical calendar that provides the context for the other meanings; it is also applied
to the annual cycle of ecclesiastical festivals; and it refers to the document that appears at
the beginning of a liturgical book.
The astronomical calendar in use throughout western Europe in the Middle Ages is the
Julian calendar, so-called for its establishment under Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. It defines a
year as consisting of 365 and a quarter days, requiring an additional day every fourth, or
leap, year. (This is some eleven minutes longer than the true astronomical year, creating
the need for the corrections of the Gregorian calendar worked out under Pope Gregory
XIII in 1582: the omission of ten days in October 1582 and the subsequent omission of
the leap year in years divisible by 100 but not 400.) The Julian calendar utilized the
twelve months of modern usage but had no weeks. The seven days of the week, named
after the seven planets as then understood, were added in the 2nd century. The seven-day
week, long maintained in the Jewish calendar, greatly influenced the Christian calendar,
which replaced the Sabbath by Sunday as the principal day.
The annual round of liturgical dates is divided into a temporal and a sanctoral cycle.
The temporal cycle, or temporale, consists of Sundays and the feast days commemorating
the events of the life of Jesus Christ. There is a lesser sequence of fixed dates associated
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