The Birth of Time
March has two of the year’s most important anniversaries: the creation of the world and the creation of time.
‘Though all the months are adorned with various kinds of joy and honour, March is the most so.’ That was the opinion of an 11th-century English expert on the calculation of time, Byrhtferth of Ramsey, and many medieval scholars would have agreed with his view. What makes March a superlative month? The answer to that question lies in one of the most complex and perplexing areas of medieval attitudes to time and history – one very foreign from a modern scientific perspective, but carefully reasoned, coherent on its own terms, and intriguing.
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