Evelyn Lincoln

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Note: This essay is expanded from the version printed in Manual 19.

At the top of the page we see in thick black letters: “This Calendar is good for all Dioceses.”¹ It looks more like a piece of sheet music than a calendar, with note-like signs arranged horizontally in a dozen even rows, floating above a line of black triangles, punctuated by a red one after every six. This rubricated sawtooth ribbon counts out the rhythm of the days, which crowd each other in even succession from January 1 at the top left to December 31 at the bottom right. The triangle for December 31 is empty, and slightly overlapped by a brown one, alerting us to possible challenges for someone whose job at the printer’s shop was to identify all the Sundays on the hundreds of identical woodblock prints comprising the 1617 run of the calendar with a brush and stencil and two pots of gouache, one red and one brown. That printshop is identified just below the month of December: “Printed in Augsburg by the heirs of Hans Hofer.”² Each of these dozen rows has three registers: a series of tiny pictographs at the top provide a reminder of Christian feast days, so we see a rabbi holding the Christ child and a very large knife because January 1 is the Feast of the Circumcision; three crowns for the Magi on Epiphany, January 6; a Tau with two bells for Saint Anthony on the 17th; a haloed torso shot through with arrows for St. Sebastian on the 20th; etc. Little fish (e.g., February 15) and plucked chickens (November 11) signify meatless days. The middle row contains the signs for daily activities important to the calendar’s viewers, explained by a legend at the top. There are black circles for the New Moon and red ones for Full Moons, a double cross signifies good days to let blood and an odd symbol that looks like an upside-down tub for propitious days to take a bath. A cross with a little hook at the bottom signals the best days to plant seeds, and other signs predict that it will be cold, damp, windy, warm, or just not a great day.

To the right of the legend, a pinecone in a cup [Fig. 1], the symbol of the city of Augsburg, attaches this simple calendar to that city’s leading position in the production of prints and illustrated books. Necessary to a wide audience, such products were publishers’ bread and butter. They involved not only the work of printers and woodblock carvers, but also a reliable prognosticator to work out the calendar for the coming year, ascertaining that all the necessary feasting and fasting days, as well as the weather and medical information, were properly calculated.³ An extant uncut impression of the calendar for 1567 in Munich Staatsbibliothek [Fig. 2] shows the prints arranged two-up on the sheet, already colored and ready to be separated, as a time-saving measure.⁴ It allows us to note the slight differences between the two in the blocks used and the effects of the stenciled hand-coloring. Little still exists from Hofer’s long-running establishment, which specialized in embroidery pattern books and ephemeral broadsides like these annual calendars, which would have been pasted to walls. Although there would be as little reason to preserve a calendar in 1617 as there would be today, some do survive, all remarkably similar. The earliest I have found is the one for the year 1567, also printed by Hofer’s heirs, as is one from 1585 in the collection of the Yale Art Gallery [Fig. 3]⁵. Almost twice as long as the RISD calendar, it has space for more elaborate pictographs and to add numbers beneath each day marker, so that readers do not have to count them to figure out the date (but those who could not read numbers or letters could still use the calendar quite well). There is also a useful band of Zodiac symbols below the dates.

To the left of the legend, in a little square on this and all the other surviving versions of the calendar, is a simplified version of Zodiac Man: a ubiquitous medical figure that, from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, was a key to what parts of the human body corresponded to which Zodiac signs. The head is therefore overlaid by the ram for Aries, the neck by the bull of Taurus, the genitalia with the be-clawed Scorpio, and the two fish of Pisces at the feet, so that medical attention to the ailing body part could be adjusted to the phases of the moon. This is one of the reasons that the discrete band of Zodiac symbols below the enumerated rows of days is such a useful feature of some of the calendars. The Zodiac signs also appear along the left side of the sheet, corresponding to the rows for the months. We see, for example, a man pouring water for January-Aquarius, and images of herbs and flowers, or a figure in the act of harvesting, planting, or, in the case of December, butchering a hog, as would be found in books of hours. The names of the months are also keyed to these activities, so that July is called Hay Moon (Heu Mon) showing a man with a scythe, and September is Wine Moon (Wein Mon) with a picture of a man holding a bunch of grapes. Similar wall calendars were printed into the 1800s, with the addition of good days to cut hair but without the days for bloodletting [Fig. 4].⁶ But the traditional format of these useful, lucrative, and much anticipated prints changed so little over the centuries that even the version for 1843 shows tiny images of Zodiac figures along the left-hand side of the sheet.