Blackwell Reference Online

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When Theodore arrived in England in 669, Bede reports, he taught the art of metre, astronomy and ‘arithmeticae ecclesiasticae disciplinam’ (Colgrave and Mynors 1969: 332), that is, ‘the study of ecclesiastical arithmetic’, usually known as computus, a term which is applied both to the study of time-reckoning and to texts relating to that study. Inevitably, the production of tables that accurately predicted the date of Easter and other moveable feasts in any given year of the Julian calendar was the practical focus of early medieval computus. As the timing of Easter is determined by reference to the luni-solar cycles, study of astronomy was fundamental to computus. Aldhelm, one of the first Anglo-Saxons to study at the Canterbury school established by Theodore and Hadrian, wrote to his bishop in Wessex of the ‘intense disputation of computation’ at the Canterbury school, of the ‘profound study’ of ‘the circle of the twelve signs [the Zodiac] that rotates at the peak of heaven’, as well as ‘the complex reckoning of the horoscope’, by which he presumably meant a sun-dial or some kind of tabulated data (Lapidge and Herren 1979: 152).Subsequently, some time before Aldhelm became bishop of Sherborne c.706, he produced his own table for calculating Easter. The ‘Cyclus Aldhelmi’, based on a lunar period of twenty-nine and a half days, survives in six manuscripts dating from the ninth to ... log in or subscribe to read full text