with Christmas and the Epiphany, December 25 and January 6; and a major sequence
associated with Easter, which is celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon of
spring. The precise calculation of Easter’s date, involving differences over the
astronomical calendar and other issues, was the subject of intense controversy in the early
Middle Ages. The sanctoral cycle, or sanctorale, includes the feast days of saints; these
are celebrated on the date of their death, a practice stemming from the fact that the early
sanctorale is derived from the Martyrology, itself originating as a calendar
commemorating the date and place of a martyr’s passion. The temporal and sanctoral
festivals were interspersed in the early-medieval liturgical books but eventually
separated.
The calendars that preceded liturgical books generally devoted one page to each
month beginning with January. One line, in turn, was devoted to each day of the month,
giving the name and type of its feast, or left blank if none occurred. In the left-hand
margin were three columns of numbers and letters. The inner one gave the date of the
month, usually according to the Roman system of nones, ides, and kalends. A second
gave the so-called dominical letters, a series of the first seven letters of the alphabet,
repeated continuously over the twelve months of the year; thus, whatever letter stood next
to the first Sunday of a given year would point to the remainder of its Sundays. Finally,
the outer column of numbers called the “golden numbers,” encoded the annual lunar
tables in such a way so that if they were used in conjunction with the dominical letters a
knowledgeable person could calculate the date of Easter for any year.
In the later Middle Ages, calendars were often the subject of special artistic attention,
displaying two twelve-fold series of illustrations: the signs of the zodiac and the labors of
the month. The latter in particular were sometimes splendidly executed, as in the
celebrated full-page miniatures of the Très Riches Heures of John of Berry. These book
paintings, in turn, influenced some of the earliest easel paintings, like Breugel’s great
series on the months of the year.
James McKinnon
[See also: BOOK OF HOURS; CANONICAL HOURS; DIVINE OFFICE; MASS,
CHANTS AND TEXTS]
Frere, Walter. Studies in Early Roman Liturgy. London: Oxford University Press, 1930, Vol. 1: The
Kalendar.
MacArthur, A.Allan. The Evolution of the Christian Year. London: SCM, 1953.
Thurston, Herbert. “Calendar.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Appleton, 1908, Vol. 3,
pp. 158–66.
CAMBRAI
. Capital of a Frankish kingdom destroyed by Clovis in the early 6th century, Cambrai
(Nord) was attached to Lotharingia in the division of Charlemagne’s empire in 843. The
cathedral of Cambrai, destroyed in the aftermath of the French Revolution, was one of the
largest and most important Gothic structures in northern France. It was built in three
major phases, beginning with the west tower in 1148, a scheme that was revised after the
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