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Jun. 27th, 2006 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gillpolackLittle obsessions take up much time.
Today I looked closely at the alignment of the Jewish and Christian calendars. I've done that before - living with two calendars and all that - but never quite so concretely and never for the Middle Ages. The most interesting thing were the liturgical cycles, but almost as cool was how much cultural information was encoded in both systems. Combining the systems and their specific usage and treating the end product as a code that can be unfolded and interpreted gives you an amazing amount of information about Western Europe. The agricultural cycles are there, and the fiscal and financial. It's all very cool.
Alas, that only a small part of my calendar is useful in a given novel and so I almost done - just got to add a bit of seasonal activity. I will keep developing my year despite this, because it is a lovely diagrammatic way of remembering the various cycles and exploring their interconnections.
Today I looked closely at the alignment of the Jewish and Christian calendars. I've done that before - living with two calendars and all that - but never quite so concretely and never for the Middle Ages. The most interesting thing were the liturgical cycles, but almost as cool was how much cultural information was encoded in both systems. Combining the systems and their specific usage and treating the end product as a code that can be unfolded and interpreted gives you an amazing amount of information about Western Europe. The agricultural cycles are there, and the fiscal and financial. It's all very cool.
Alas, that only a small part of my calendar is useful in a given novel and so I almost done - just got to add a bit of seasonal activity. I will keep developing my year despite this, because it is a lovely diagrammatic way of remembering the various cycles and exploring their interconnections.