Reforming time: Calendars and almanacs in early modern England

Reforming Time examines a body of printed material which has been largely neglected in accounts of the early modern period: calendars and almanacs. Even more than clocks, it argues, these printed timetables are representative of the early modern interest in time and temporal forms. The dissertation traces their emergence and proliferation in England from the Reformation to the Civil War, marking the changes they undergo in the print shop and relating them to several contemporary literary works informed by the same interest in re-shaping and re-inflecting annual time. The liturgical calendar used past events to structure present experience, and it also prescribed behavior, stipulating the times of labor, feasting, and fasting. Restructuring the calendar was thus central to framing influence and power. This dissertation shows how the calendar was inflected at four different cultural levels: religious, monarchical, artisanal, and individual. Chapter One looks at John Foxe\u27s renovation of the traditional calendar in his Book of Martyrs. His calendar substitutes Reformation figures for the saints of Catholic tradition, and by bringing local events and persons into the calendar, Foxe signals a shifting Protestant understanding of the calendar\u27s temporality. Spenser also contributes to the Protestant project of converting the calendar. Chapter Two demonstrates how Spenser designed a uniquely English timetable in the service of Elizabeth and English nationalism, and it shows that The Shepheardes Calender responds to contemporary attempts to realign the calendar with celestial motions. Drawing from a range of early modern texts, including Shakespeare\u27s Henry V and Julius Caesar, Chapter Three shows how popular groups asserted their guild identity by altering the calendar\u27s holy days. Chapter Four examines portable, affordable almanac calendars, texts that provided individuals with a new means of recording their own private experience of time, and it shows how these new registers of experience inform Donne\u27s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. The dissertation ends by suggesting how the writing of the details of corporeal existence into almanacs satisfied the need to enact and embody which had been curtailed by the Reformation