"Calendar" by David Duncan (ISBN 0-380-97528-9)
I've recently finished the book "Calendar" and was somewhat disappointed. The author is obviously an historian and may be trying to "cash in" on the coming new millennium. The explanation of the idiosyncrasies of the Gregorian calendar in century years, along with some historical background, would have provided enough material for a good magazine article. The author, however, has chosen to drag in every historical reference he has ever come across and turn it into a book.
David Duncan has used the calendar as a theme to produce a vest pocket history of the world and it just does not work. The calendar does not provide enough of a unifying theme and the result is more a collection of anecdotes than a history from an interesting point of view. It is a little like someone trying to construct a history based on, say, "advances in sailing ship rigging".
His explanations of exactly why the calendar is awkward are not clear and suffer from having various parts of the explanation scattered throughout the book. His understanding of the technical aspects of the problem, I suspect, are best described as "soft". He may even have committed a technical "howler" on page 200, where he seems to think the tropics are warmer because they are closer to the sun. The point he is trying to make, however, is explained so poorly that it is hard to tell WHAT he thinks.
He also seems to make no distinction between the calendar and clocks, which are only related to each other and are NOT the same thing. The calendar is a "bookkeeping" system that attempts to keep track of several varying time intervals that are not related to each other in any simple way. Clocks, on the other hand, are instruments used to measure time intervals and could, indeed, exist completely outside of any calendar system. If the orbit of the earth were such that there were no seasons, humans may well have NEVER developed a calendar but would certainly have developed clocks.
One of Duncan's central premises is that the Gregorian calendar reform was driven by the medieval Catholic church's need to define the "correct" date for Easter. I do not find this convincing. The council of Nicaea did decide to tie the date of the observance of Easter to the spring equinox. Having done this, however, I think the fact that the date would "drift out of sync with astronomy" did NOT particularly bother anyone until the error accumulated to the point of being inconvenient and, perhaps, embarrassing. In an agricultural economy calendars keep track of the seasons, and the fact that you are off by a day or so makes little difference. I do not believe that the people of the time were less pragmatic than today. They simply did not want to bother with a "fix" of something that still worked good enough. When they did decide to fix things, they may have use the date of Easter to justify going through the considerable confusion during the change. The Easter excuse probably also made it more likely that the new calendar would be adopted as widely as possible.
Perhaps the most impressive point in the development of our current calendar is that the fundamental information about the length of the year, was known so early in human history. When Julius Caesar instituted his calendar in 45 BC., it was already known that the year was not exactly 365 1/4 days long. This is a great testimony to human insight and curiosity. In fact the current Gregorian calendar system IS the Julian calendar system with the exception of how years ending in "00" are determined to be leap years. Duncan glosses over this in his attempt to make the subject as mystical as possible.
Read the book to find some interesting historical anecdotes, but don't expect to find out what makes the calendar tick.
JGD
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