The Medieval Calendar (Video by The Getty Museum)

This video by the Getty Museum shows a few pages of a medieval calendar. The medieval calendar, in portrait mode a page a month, served as a map of the Church year. While following the method of the Roman calendar in determining dates, it also listed saints’ days and other religious feasts and recorded the phases of the moon. Many calendars also featured related illustrations of saints, feasts, monthly labors, leisure activities, and signs of the zodiac. They, too, divided their month into weeks, but the first day, ninth day (nonce), and fifteenth day (ides) were the most important days and people referred to other days of the month in relation to these three; for example, the 17th of the month was two days after the ides.