Unfolding Time: The Medieval Pocket Calendar
Free to watch online
Unfolding Time: The Medieval Pocket Calendar, an exhibition presently on view at Lambeth Palace Library in London,1 explores ideas about time in the middle ages through the concertina-fold almanac, a rare and remarkable book type introduced in the fourteenth century.
Concertinas are formed of oblong parchment strips, folded lengthwise and then in an accordion or concertina pattern. Cuts in the parchment allow different sections to be accessed without unfolding the entire sheet. People in medieval Europe tracked time through planetary motion, seasonal shift, historic events, and religious celebrations.
Concertina-fold almanacs illuminate and align these varied cycles. In them, time is vividly expressed in colorful pictures, poems, tables, and devices. Just twenty-nine of these extremely fragile folded manuscripts are known to survive; the Lambeth exhibition brings a selection together, for the first time. In this talk, Sarah Griffin, curator of the exhibition, and Megan McNamee, a collaborator, will introduce the concertina corpus and discuss the process of putting these frighteningly fragile, fiendishly complex, and wonderfully dynamic little books on public view.
All are welcome, but those wishing to attend should book a free ticket via Microsoft Teams or email archives@churchofengland.org no later than Tuesday 8 April.
More information and a link to register are available here.
What is a concertina-fold almanac?
Lambeth Palace Library – Bibliotheca Lambethana . Lambeth Palace Library is the historic library and record office of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the national library and archive of the Church of England. Its collections have been freely available for research from 1610, when it was founded under the will of Archbishop Richard Bancroft.
Super. Many thanks for sharing this.
These are so cool!