A Medical-Astronomical Calendar

Bring the everyday life of the Middle Ages directly into your living room with the Medical-Astronomical Calendar! Tips on health and nutrition, divinations, weather forecasts and monthly rules: a sumptuously equipped, perpetual calendar from around 1460 gives you a deep insight into the medieval world of imagination month after month. On 24 pages, it combines a wide variety of components and is simultaneously an annual calendar, medical guide, astrological guide and weather forecast. Colourful book decoration and vivid figures full of life illustrate each month. Even today, such a guidebook is still a very special treasure chest in every household.

The medieval cosmos

The health and character of people are determined by cosmic forces according to medieval ideas. Following ancient tradition, everything consists of the four elements earth, fire, water and air. Four primary qualities are assigned to these (dry, moist, hot and cold), which in turn are connected with the four bodily juices and the four temperaments (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic). Depending on the season, the position of the moon, the zodiac sign, the month, the day or the hour, there were different influences on the mixture of juices of medieval man, which had to be balanced out – to be informed about the cosmos was therefore essential for treating or preventing diseases.

House book of Alsatian patrician?

Details of the book binding as well as missing wormholes on the back of the last monthly leaf reveal that this calendar was part of a much larger book. The generous use of gold and precious opaque colors make it a representative codex. While some of the calendar’s saints’ festivals point to the diocese of Strasbourg, the style of painting is influenced by the Upper Rhine (Freiburg/Colmar). The pictures of the monthly medallions, signs of the zodiac and the scholarly depictions are associated with the “Master B”, who also worked as a freelance illustrator for the famous workshop of Diebold Lauber in northern Alsace.

As is typical with medieval calendars, there are also a lot of details to discover on this calendar leaf: first a column for the Golden Number in red Roman numerals j-xix (to calculate the new moons and movable holidays like Easter), then for the Sunday letters A-g (to determine the day of the week in relation to the dates). The red letters are used to identify the Roman calendar order according to calends, nones and ides. To the right in the wide column of text are the feasts of the saints for the month in question, the high feasts in red, and the ordinary feasts in ink. Above and below the calendar of saints there is information about the number of days in the calendar month and the corresponding lunar month, as well as the distribution of day and night hours.

Facsimile Edition

Enjoy Viewing a Few Sample Pages:

A Glance at the Facsimile

This section of the Medical-Astronomical Calendar shows the months January to March, as well as the first page of the calendar with the yearly forecasts. It starts with a page of annual forecasts, which depend on the day of the week on which the first day of the year falls. The following double pages of the months of January, February and March always show the calendar on one side and the health rules on the other, together with forecasts based on meteorological-cosmic phenomena. Golden Gothic keel arches decorate the columns of text, and a scholarly figure adds weight to the contents.

A facsimile of a testimony

The Medical-Astronomical Calendar was auctioned in 2015 by the National and University Library of Strasbourg for £ 55 000. The original was digitised with the greatest care in the library rooms to faithfully reproduce the bright opaque colours and the precious gold decoration in the facsimile. The parchment binding presents the bookbinder with special challenges. The material, which is difficult to process, requires a special binding technique that only a few bookbinders still master.

Careful transcription

The text inventory of the Medical-Astronomical Calendar is not a homogeneous whole, but consists of different elements, each with its own text and tradition history. Thanks to intensive studies, the author of the commentary has succeeded in identifying the existing texts for the first time. Several additions have been added to the existing text over the centuries. With the careful transcription, the text is already easy to understand and offers a direct insight into the dialectal colouring of the writing language.