Modeling Recursive and Linear Temporalities in the Old English Menologium

The Old English Menologium, a short calendar poem that appears uniquely in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i, opens with a rhetorical flourish offering notice of the Nativity:1Crist wæs acennyd, cyninga wuldoron midne winter, mære þeodenece ælmihtig, on þy eahteoðan dægHælend gehaten, heofonrices weard.2 (ll. 1–4)In addition to marking the birth of Christ, this long clause initiates the forward movement through the year that characterizes the remainder of the poem as it notes the arrivals of the months and seasons, significant solar dates, and liturgical observances; the poet situates the audience firmly in "midwinter" before jumping ahead eight days to Christ's circumcision, an event, as the poem notes, during which a child was named. Beginning with a singular historical event that occurred in the past and then progressing forward eight days, the poem immediately demonstrates its engagement with two temporal understandings, time's cycle and time's arrow. In his account of the intellectual history of deep time, Stephen Jay Gould discusses these temporal metaphors.3 Time's arrow represents the linear modality, in which "history is an irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events," and "all moments, considered in proper sequence, tell a story of linked events moving in a direction."4 This understanding tends to be associated with Christianity, which teaches that time is both created and finite, its beginning coterminous with the creation of the world and its conclusion arriving with the End Times.5 Time's cycle, which describes "recurring cycles of separable events precisely repeated," lacks such terminality.6 In contrast to a long historical narrative, this temporal sense calls to mind observable phenomena, since "everyday life is determined by a number of different temporal cycles."7 These include recurring events like the succession of day and night, seasonal transitions, the growth and decay of flora and fauna, and the regular movements of heavenly bodies. Though Gould's monograph focuses on nineteenth-century scholars who used these metaphors in their reconstruction of earth's history, these paradigms also occupied their early medieval predecessors.8 Cognizant of their place on the timeline of salvation history while also beholden to the whims of natural cycles that affected agriculture, warfare, and religious observance, every person, lay and ecclesiastical, low- and high-ranking, had to navigate these sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory systems.9An artifact that inscribes this interest is British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i, the texts of which construct a nuanced discourse on the relationship between linear and cyclical time. This composite manuscript consists of two parts, the first comprising the Old English Orosius, copied at the beginning of the eleventh century, and the second, written during the 1040s, the Menologium, the Cotton Maxims, and the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.10 Given their production at different periods, the two parts were regarded as unrelated until Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe observed that the layout of the second was planned to match that of the Orosius text.11 Their intentional assembly reveals that the poems and the Chronicle were intended to be read alongside Orosius's history, and the artifact as a whole examines the relationship between a linear, historical framework of time represented by the prose texts and the cyclical, immanent present of the poems.12 Within the manuscript's sophisticated and extensive discourse on the nature of time, the Menologium assumes special significance as a work that recreates the human experience of moving through the natural and liturgical events of a single year in the present.13This article argues that the Menologium presents a more anthropocentric, cyclical understanding of time that complements the full sweep of God's providence from creation to the final age of the world recounted in Orosius and the Chronicle.14 Likely composed in southern England during the late tenth or early eleventh century as an expansion of a short prose text known as the "Prose Menologium," the poem initially seems a straightforward catalogue of the months, solar events, and major liturgical festivals that occur during the course of the year.15 Over its 231 lines, however, the poem foregrounds the human perception of passing time, while also recognizing the ability of skilled individuals to interpret God's temporal creation. Most significantly, the Menologium posits that the correct observation of liturgical events occurs because of the human ability to straddle various temporalities.16 In its annual circuit from and back to the Nativity, it suggests that, rather than insignificant blips on the salvation timeline hurtling toward the eschaton, a community of observers can reactivate the unique events of Christian historical time in the present. The poem thus models how people can interact with time's arrow while locked into the various cycles of daily life. In setting all of these temporal aspects to verse, a form that lends itself to nonlinear temporalities, it offers insight into the understanding of time in early medieval England from a perspective different than near-contemporary works like Byrhtferth's Enchiridion or Ælfric's De temporibus anni, which teach computistical lore to their audiences.17 Rather than serving a didactic purpose, the Menologium depicts the various ways that people engage with their temporal reality, both as passive observers to the rhythms of diurnal, seasonal, and annual rhythms and as active participants in the annual renewal of Christian history enabled by the liturgy. In doing so, this "minor poem" expresses, in a controlled and artful manner, how the early English understood themselves to exist in time.The Menologium invites its audience to ruminate on the experience of time by means of the system that provides its underlying structure: relative dating. Like other metrical calendars produced in early medieval England, the poem takes as its structural model the Julian calendar, itself a method of reckoning based on the solar year.18 While Anglo-Latin texts like the metrical calendars of York and Ramsey mark observances by month and day—a system familiar to modern readers—the vernacular poem uses a relative dating system that notes the time (reckoned in niht, "nights," wucan, "weeks," or a combination of the two) that has elapsed from one event to the next, each connected by means of the recurrent temporal phrase þæs emb(e), "after," which occurs at the beginning of each clause introducing a new event.19 A sampling of lines from the middle of the poem demonstrates the operation of the system: And þæs embe twa niht þætte tæhte GodElenan eadigre æþelust beama,on þam þrowode þeoden englafor manna lufan, meotud on galganbe fæder leafe. Swylce ymb fyrst wucanbutan anre niht þætte yldum bringðsigelbeorhte dagas sumor to tune . . . Þæs emb eahta and nigondogera rimes þætte drihten namin oðer leoht Agustinus. (ll. 83–89; 95–97)This method of reckoning is unique to the prose and the verse Menologium, so it is worth considering the significance of the way it renders time.20 Some scholars have suggested a straightforward justification for the use of this dating system as a means of conveying the dates of liturgical festivals to those lacking the skills necessary to find them otherwise.21 This seems likely for the prose text, which features formulaic, single-clause entries separated visually in its manuscript recensions by a Tironian et followed by þæs emb(e) and the appropriate series of Roman numerals.22 However, it is less practical for its verse counterpart, which layers dense apposition, varying clause and notice lengths, and the addition of the months of the Julian calendar, a temporal frame not included in the prose text. These qualities suggest that, rather than a means of determining the dates of liturgical festivals, the purpose of the poem and its reckoning system is something else entirely.23Another explanation interprets relative dating as a more figurative method of reckoning that represents the inherent connection between the natural and sacred events that make up the year and emphasizes their status as equally significant aspects of God's creation. Nicholas Howe, for example, asserts that the poem represents "a sustained attempt to order the mystery of time by identifying its various measures and then weaving them into a harmonious whole."24 Beyond establishing such links, this interconnection emulates the human experience of passing time. The poem binds its disparate entries, separated on the calendar by a variable number of days (and historically by hundreds of years), with a formula that begins with þæs embe, "after," followed by the number of nights or weeks that must advance until the next entry. This is apparent in the above passage: "and þæs embe twa niht" begins the quotation and connects the Invention of the True Cross to the feasts of Philip the Apostle and James that immediately precede it. A modified version of the phrase, "swylce ymb fyrst wucan butan anre niht," connects the discovery of the cross to the advent of summer, which itself gives way, "þæs emb eahta and nigon dogera rimes," to the feast of Augustine. This reckoning formula circumscribes individual entries—as in the prose text, once an audience heard or read some variation of þæs emb(e) + nights and/or weeks, they would be alerted to the onset of a new notice—and serves as the bond that links disparate temporal events to one another.Given the apparent difficulties with utilizing the Menologium as a functional calendar, it seems as though the poem invites its listeners and readers to meditate on the calendrical form. Doing so reveals something more human than a catalogue of various dates: an anthropocentrism conveyed by its reckoning system. Relative dating captures the human experience of living within time. Being bound within both the constant forward motion and inherent circularity of chronology means that the experience of time passing is, to a large extent, a practice of waiting.25 Though people mark important events on calendars, they must wait days, weeks, or months for their arrivals. Between such occurrences, we remain locked within the diurnal cycles that govern our day-to-day lives. The Menologium acknowledges this experience of time as it shepherds its audience from one natural or liturgical event to the next. In doing so, it reveals its concern not with the precise observance of individual dates, but with reproducing the experience of being in time.Building upon the foundation provided by this frame, the poem elaborates on its representation of the experience of time by the style with which it relates the arrivals and departures of days, months, and seasonal events over the course of the year. In describing the movements of these natural phenomena, the poet deploys a series of tags and semantic constructions to replicate the sense of a stationary human observer positioned at the center of a temporal order around whom events come and go. The construction of this sense by the poet has been recognized by Hansen, who views these formulaic fillers as reflecting the "anthropocentric focus" of the poem.26 She points out that verbs of motion, such as cuman "to come," sigan "to approach, to advance," and scriðan "to move, glide," work in conjunction with the deictic tags to/on/of tun(e), "to town, into town, from town," to wicum "to dwellings," in burh "into the fortification," and on geard "into the enclosure," to convey a sense of movement towards a community.27 The poem, however, restricts the use of these tags and formulas to the nonliturgical events observed.28 By using such expressions, the poet personifies events as routine visitors to sites of human habitation.29 As Pauline Head describes, the speaker and audience remain stable in time and place: "they remain in their 'town' and are visited in turn by the seasons . . . rather than humans moving through time as life passes, they are stable and secure—unchanging witnesses of a perpetually recurring sequence of events."30 The poem conveys these sentiments by means of its recurring verbal formulas, which it attaches to the arrival of natural events and works in conjunction with the reckoning system to render a simulacrum of the human experience of time.It is worth here emphasizing that this construction of time places a pluralistic rather than an individual subject at its center. This is apparent in the words for locations used in the expressions outlined above: tun, burh, wic, all of which describe built, inhabited settlements.31 These nouns, moreover, often appear in apposition to or alongside words indicating groups of people. August, for example, "comes to town" and brings Lammas Day yrmenþeodum "to people everywhere" (l. 139); October fereð, "travels," both on folc, "to the folk," (l. 182) and on tun "into town" (l. 183); while December accretes apposition as it brings the morning following the feast of St. Andrew to tune "to town," folcum "to folk," mannum "to people," and drihta bearnum "to the sons of men" (ll. 218–21). At times the poet even eschews the locative descriptor entirely, as in the notice of the arrival of September, which appears geond þeoda feala "among many people" (l. 163) and fereð to folce "travels to people" (l. 165). By layering these words for groups of people and the places where they reside, the poem continually centers communities of human observers as it travels through the year. Not only do the months and seasons come and go, transforming the landscape and affecting the places where people dwell, but they also bring the exigencies of the year to the people who enjoy or endure them.32The Menologium pushes this communal focus further, referring not only to some abstract sense of "people" in general, but implicating its immediate audience in this experience as well. To do so, at points throughout the work, the poet repeats the first-person pronoun us as an indirect object in clauses that detail these arrivals and departures. After opening with a brief description of the Nativity and the Circumcision in the initial four lines, the poet notes that the Feast of the Circumcision and the beginning of the year are held at the same time because "se kalend us cymeð geþincged / on þam ylcan dæge us to tune" (the calends comes to town among us on the same day, determined for us) (ll. 7–8). Here the audience is drawn into the temporal experience of the poem, this communal inclusivity emphasized by the double repetition of the first-person pronoun—time and the events that it conveys are experienced by all of us. The poet returns to this communal us throughout, as with the arrivals of April, "Eastermonað to us cymeð" (April comes to us) (l. 72), June brings "tiida lange . . . us to tune" (long hours to town among us) (ll. 107–108), and in a description of the events of winter, "us wunian ne mot wangas grene" (green fields cannot remain with us) (l. 206). In these examples and others, the first-person dative personal pronoun functions similarly to the anthropocentric nouns described earlier, contributing to the overall sense of temporal movement centered around a human community.33Us occurs in such contexts ten times throughout the poem, always tied to the arrival or departure of a month or a season.34 In six of those instances, the pronoun appears as an alliterating, stressed particle (as in l. 34, "ufor anre niht us to tune" (it comes) to town one night later among us).35 As a personal pronoun, us generally falls into the metrical dip of a verse line, so by repeatedly placing the word in a more prominent metrical position, the poet emphasizes this communal discourse. In conjunction with relative dating and the other nominal and verbal constructions that evoke a sense of movement towards people, the repetition and metrical prominence of us involves speaker and audience in the annual course of seasons and months.Yet for all that the language of the Menologium places humans at the center of natural phenomena, the nouns and pronouns in the constructions outlined above typically function as indirect objects. This facilitates a double movement; portraying human communities as the pivot around which time flows, destinations toward whom natural events travel rather than movers themselves, seems to remove their subjectivity. Though the natural events described are literally anthropocentric in the sense that months and seasons come to us, folce, leodum, and then travel away, the poem posits that even without the presence of humans to observe these phenomena, they would arrive and depart in their natural course. Like relative dating, this creates the sense of being stuck in time: if the community did not exist, seasons and months would still "come to town"; their movements would simply proceed unnoticed. In this way, the poem establishes the process of the natural cycle as a time beyond control that subjects human observers to its whims, dictating "the chosen times of waking and sleeping, eating and drinking, working and playing, feasting and fasting."36 Although such rhetoric attempts to reproduce the feeling of existing in time, it is not the only way that people engage with temporality. The poet offers a counterpoint to this passive experience by celebrating the human capacity to interpret time and shape temporal practices.As it constructs this vision of a temporal existence to which humans and their communities are subjected, the Menologium simultaneously complicates this notion. For all that people must observe passively the various natural cycles that affect their lives, they also rely on the understanding of those who interpret time and impose upon it an observable structure. The bells that pealed notice of the liturgical hours in the monastery would have been heard by a surrounding community, for example, affording the daily cycle a shape beyond the strictly observable occurrences of dawn and sunset.37 Likewise, the work of scholars orders the experience of time and provides a comprehensible shape to God's temporal creation. In the first movement of its anthropocentric turn, the poem celebrates these temporal interlocutors who enable engagement with the events that comprise its calendar.This interest in the human role in temporal understanding is apparent immediately, as the poem's opening lines grapple with the beginning of the year, one of the thornier topics in medieval English timekeeping. The lines on the Nativity quoted above seem a straightforward place to begin a description of the year; the birth of Christ is one of the most significant events on the liturgical calendar, since it substantiates the telos of salvation history as its principal unique, nonrepeatable event. Yet despite this apparently logical starting point, the Menologium curiously provides an alternative in the lines that follow: wæs on þy eahteoðan dægHælend gehaten, heofonrices weard.Swa þa sylfan tiid, side herigeas,folc unmæte, habbað foreweard gear,for þy se kalend us cymeð geþincgedon þam ylcan dæge us to tune,forma monað. Hine folc mycelIanuarius gerum heton. (ll. 3–10)This passage treats the feast of the Circumcision, celebrated on the first of January, and synchronizes the liturgical observance with the beginning of the Roman year.38 The poem quickly moves from sacred observance to the Julian calendar as it highlights the role of humans in demarcating time, explaining that the beginning of measured time is established by consensus among groups of people (side herigeas, l. 5; folc unmæte, l. 6; and folc mycel, l. 9). The following lines reinforce this point, emphasizing the origin of that reckoning with reference to the Romans and their reckoning system, a cluster of associations that culminates with use of the Latin month-name Ianuarius.39 With these references to the timekeeping practices of people in the present, as well as the methods of dividing the year employed by the Romans, the Menologium reveals its interest in the role of human understanding in parsing temporalities. God made time, but humanity must interpret it, aligning the yearly cycle and natural phenomena with the linear timeline stretching from creation to eschaton.Yet there remains a difficulty with the beginning of the year as it is presented in the poem. The feast of the Nativity occurs on 25 December. This coincides with the winter solstice, as the text makes clear (on midne winter, l. 2), but it is not the start of the Roman year or the feast of the Circumcision, both of which occur on 1 January. The poet clearly states that many people observe the latter date, yet beginning and concluding with the Nativity suggests the precedence of 25 December. By including these two options, the poem engages with contemporary discourse in early medieval England regarding when to mark the beginning of the year. Bede explains the variance in De temporum ratione, describing how the pre-Christian Saxons celebrated the new year with a midwinter celebration, which came to be associated with the birth of Christ and the beginning of the liturgical year.40 However, 1 January served as the start date for Bede's computistical calculations, a practice which became standard for computists in England thereafter.41 There is some debate regarding whether Bede himself regarded Christmas or 1 January as the start of the year.42 It seems as though popular lay and ecclesiastical convention favored the former date, perhaps reinforced by earlier Germanic practice, whereas the latter remained the point of departure for higher-order computistical work.43Other texts produced in England attest to an ambivalence regarding these possibilities. The ninth-century Old English Martyrology, for example, begins with the birth of Christ, "On þone forman dæig on geare, þæt is on þone æresten geoheldæig, eall Cristen folc worþiað Cristes acennednesse" (On the first day of the year, that is on the first Yule-day, all Christians celebrate Christ's birth), but also marks January as "se æresta geares monað mid Romwarum ond mid us" (the first month of the year for the Romans and for us).44 The martyrologist offers no hard line on which date should be preferred, and a similar ambiguity can be found in the writings of Ælfric and Byrhtferth, both working closer in time to the likely composition date of the Menologium. In his homily on the feast of the Circumcision, Ælfric gripes about the popular practice of observing the beginning of the year on 1 January. Noting that "we ne gemetað nane geswutelunge on cristenum bocum hwi ðes dæg to geares anginne geteald sy" (we find no explanation in Christian books as to why this day is reckoned the beginning of the year), he states that "ongynð ure gerim æfter romaniscre gesetnysse on þysum dæge, for nanum godcundlicum gesceade, ac for þam ealdan gewunan" (our reckoning begins, according to the Roman rule, on this day, not on account of any religious reason, but for the old custom).45 Ælfric himself preferred the date of the vernal equinox as the start of the new year.46 Likewise, in the discussion of the twelve months in his Enchiridion, Byrhtferth states, "Ærest we wyllað fon on Ianuarium, forþon he ys heafodhebba and eac þæs geares geendung," (First we will begin with January, for it is the originator and also the ending of the year).47 Yet in his description of the month itself, he conflates the Nativity and January, circumventing the issue entirely: "Se forma dæg and eall se monð ys gehalgod mid Cristes gebrydtide" (The first day and the whole month is hallowed by Christ's birthday).48 Even in a work ostensibly devoted to teaching monks and clerics about timekeeping, the Enchiridion fails to clarify precisely when the calendar year ought to begin.Such ambivalence and uncertainty are precisely what the Menologium invokes when it begins by pronouncing the birth of Christ and then, a few lines later, declares that people regard the beginning of the year as the calends of January. However, unlike the sources above, griping about the issue or ignoring it entirely, the poem stresses the difficulty of navigating these temporal issues. In doing so, it focuses on the abilities of humans to interpret time. Beginning and concluding with the birth of Christ, the poem follows popular practice regarding the start of the year as explained by Bede and confirmed by the martyrologist. At the same time, it gestures at the possibility of reckoning the date according to "the old custom." As mentioned above, the Menologium poet innovated on the template provided by the prose text by overlaying the Roman system of timekeeping onto the liturgical, seasonal, and solar events already listed. The inclusion of this temporal framework, itself a revision of an earlier Roman calendar developed with the aid of Greek mathematicians and astronomers, suggests that the poet was interested in exploring the role of people in deciphering time, as attested in these opening lines. In addition to highlighting broad communal consensus, as when the poet points out that innumerable people habbað, "hold" (l. 6), the start of the year on 1 January, this passage draws attention to the cultural inheritance of English timekeeping here with references to calendrical terms taken from Rome, such as the specialized Latin loanword kalend (l. 7) and the Latin month name Ianuarius (l. 10), before a description of the Romans as folc mycel (l. 10), presumably due to their intellectual innovation of a timekeeping system in use throughout England. Here, the poem connects the timekeepers of the classical past and the early medieval English, who continue to follow this ordering of time's cycle.49 That association also establishes continuity between the Romans and the monastic computists who, in the present, disentangle the complications of time like the "correct" start of the year and then translate that knowledge into practice. In alluding to the possibilities for the beginning of the year and then underscoring the constructed nature of temporal frameworks, the Menologium stresses that although time may have been created by God, its reckoning relies on the interpretive capabilities of human beings.The poet further develops this rhetoric by drawing the attention of its audience to those individuals involved in such interpretation. Describing the occurrence of the vernal equinox, for example, the poem refers to the rimcræftige (l. 44) who observe that phenomenon. Rimcræftig, an adjective used substantively as the subject of the clause, is a specialized word derived from the English term for computus, (ge)rimcræft.50 This appears elsewhere only in Byrthferth's Enchiridion where it is used to describe priests skilled in the knowledge of computus, so the use of this rare expression in the Menologium seems to draw audience attention to the skill and specialized knowledge of prior and contemporary computists.51 A similar motivation seems to explain the use of bises, a hapax legomenon appearing only in this poem to describe the bissext or "leap day," prior to the description of March. As the poet describes, the coming of March is well known among people, "butan þænne bises geboden weorðe / feorðan geare" (except when the bissextile day is given on the fourth year) (ll. 32–33).52 The addition of the leap day to the solar calendar, which resolves the discrepancy between the 365-day year and the actual length of the solar year, exemplifies the human ingenuity required to create and maintain these sometimes unwieldy calendrical systems, work that the poet highlights by this and other such references.Yet perhaps the passage that most exemplifies an appreciation of the role of people in interpreting of divine time occurs in the Menologium's related entries for Easter and Ascension Day. These observances are the only moveable feasts of the liturgical year included in the poem and as such cannot be tracked by its relative reckoning system, which can only accommodate the fixed dates of the sanctorale. However, these events are too significant to ignore, so the Menologium instead uses their notice as an opportunity to appreciate the expertise of those who determine such dates: Swylce emb feower and þreonihtgerimes þætte nergend sentAprelis monað, on þam oftust cymðseo mære tiid53 mannum to frofre,drihtnes ærist. . . . Ne magon we þa tide be getale healdandagena rimes, ne drihtnes stigeon heofenas up, forþan hi hwearfað aawisra gewyrdum, ac sceal wintrum frodon circule cræfte findanhalige dagas (ll. 54–58; 63–68)Relative reckoning cannot (ne magon) accommodate the feasts associated with the temporale cycle due to their variability. Coordinating ecclesiastical time is difficult and no single method can grasp the totality of temporal creation. Fortunately, this is where the rimcræftige emerge once again, as this passage allows the poet to discuss the computistical practice of dating Easter.54 The date of Easter is tied to multiple temporalities, which accounts for the emergence of an entire discipline devoted to its reckoning. The gospels attest that Christ was crucified on a Friday near Passover and rose on the following Sunday, thereby connecting the holiday to the arbitrary numbering of days in a week. According to the divine law prescribed in Exodus, the Jewish observation of Passover must occur on the first full moon of Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar. Patristic writers associated this month with the vernal equinox, thereby tying a lunar observance to a solar phenomenon, with the assumption being that the Jewish Passover observance would occur on the day that the moon was fourteen days old on or after the equinox, a period known as the Easter term. Easter day is celebrated on the following Sunday. Complicating matters further, the date of Easter could not be determined on a year-by-year ba