![]() 2 Although Copernicus did send a letter (now lost) to the council, he did not participate directly in the debates. In his preface to On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus stated that he became preoccupied with finding the accurate measurement of the lengths of the solar and lunar years at the request of Paul van Middelburg, Bishop of Fossombrone, who presided over the debates on the reform of the Julian calendar during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517). This desire to anticipate the end date and to prepare Christians for Judgment Day also animated some of the astronomers who took part in the debate on the reform of the Julian calendar at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a time of both religious and scientific crisis. ![]() By allying calendar reform to time reckoning, astronomy, and astrology, some scholars also claimed to approximate the date of the End of the World. Most of them also thought that the heavens actively influenced human agents. Matter in the Aristotelian conception of the universe was not uniform, and astronomers regarded the celestial bodies as superior in quality to the sublunary world. The imperfections of the Julian calendar, then, vexed both Christian orthodoxy and the medieval conception of the human being.īefore the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, calendar reform meant calculating a better value for the solar year, which in turn helped historians add up the number of years elapsed since the Creation of the universe based on Holy Writ, ancient histories, and such astronomical events as eclipses, planetary conjunctions, and the motion of the stars. Medieval and humanist scholars thought it was critical to celebrate religious feasts, especially Easter, in relation to the true motions of the heavenly bodies that moved around the Earth and governed the human bodily humors. The Julian calendar needed reform on more grounds than the practical one of having an agricultural calendar in agreement with the cycle of the four seasons. At the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, as this essay will argue, scientific calendar reform was fraught with questions of identifying the date of the Creation and of the End of the World. In contrast, the rational treatment of calendar problems today is incompatible with the apocalyptic imagery still very much alive in our entertainment and media industry. The media were quick to see in the millennium bug an agent of destruction of the world as we knew it: we grew so dependent on our “globally networked digital technology” that “businesses, service providers, communications” could reach a “standstill.” 1 Preventive measures were taken, and no such catastrophic event took place. Occasionally, different calendar problems come to the fore: we still remember how the year 2000 was predicted to produce major problems in computer networks because some machines abbreviated the representation of four-digit years to two digits and it was feared that the years 20 would not be distinguishable. ![]() Most countries today still successfully use the Gregorian calendar adopted in 1582. ![]() The astronomical model and its astrological implications were eventually contested at the court and in academia in France, but the alliance of chronology, astrology, and apocalypticism was to play a major role during the second half of the sixteenth century in Lutheran thought. Although his use of this astronomical model for astrological speculations about world chronology was not new, de Lille gave an original and bold reply to Pico della Mirandola’s devastating critique of astrology. De Lille conceived the calendar solar year as a unit of a great cosmic year spanning 7,153 years, the duration that he assigned to the now-obsolete theory of the motion of trepidation of the eighth sphere. It argues that astrological ideas coupled with eschatological beliefs motivated his astronomical propositions to reform the Julian calendar. This essay explores the astronomical works of Pierre de Lille, a little-known French participant in the debates on calendar reform during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517).
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