Showing posts with label Leap Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leap Day. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The Leap Saint

Following on the heels of yesterday's discussion of Leap Day, I thought we should give some attention to the poor saint whose feast day happened to fall on a day that only appeared in the calendar every four years.

Matthias, from the workshop of the
Italian painter Simone Martini (c.1284-1344)
St. Matthias was not a medieval saint. He was one of the Apostles, and is thought to have died in 80 CE. That is the only quantitative piece of data that is agreed upon. He died in either Jerusalem or Judea or Colchis. Chosen by lot to replace Judas, he was called either Matthias (Acts 1:24-25) or Zacchaeus (by Clement of Alexandria), or Tolmai (by Eusebius), or Barnabas (by literature ascribed to Pope Clement I); and a 19th century German scholar thinks he is the Nathanael in the Gospel of John.

One thing that is not in dispute, however, is that his feast day was 24 February. To modern readers, that does not ring any bells. In the Classical Era and the Middle Ages, however, this put him in an unusual spot in the calendar: Leap Day.

That's right: Leap Day used to be 24 February, which you can read about here. The unusual thing about 24 February being the extra day in a Leap Year wasn't so much that it was not placed at the end of the month, but that—it being an "extra" day of the year—it was treated as a "bonus" and was simply repeated; that is, 24 February appeared twice in a row in Leap Years.

Does that mean that the feast day of St. Matthias was celebrated twice? Yes. The Smithfield Decretals, an expansive book on ecclesiastical law, explains:
A standard solar year has 365 days and six hours, so in four years’ time these hours make 24 extra hours, which must be added as a new day to every fourth year. This additional day is what we call “double-sixth-day”, because, although it is counted as an addition, it stands under the same number as the previous day in the calendar, so that the two days are regarded as one and the same. The extra day is inserted in the calendar after 24 February (six days before the first day of March) so that we celebrate the memory of St Matthias the Apostle (24 February) on the next day, too. [link]
Lucky Matthias! Little is known about him, but he gets to be venerated two days in a row! Well, not anymore. The Church of England has kept him at 24 February, but in 1969 the Roman Catholic Calendar moved him to 14 May so that he could be celebrated outside of Lent and on a post-Easter day that would be closer to what would have been the day of his choosing.

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

The Leap Day That Wasn't

Bernard of Botone (d.1266) gloss on Leap Day
Most of you know that Julius Caesar in the 1st century BCE wanted to fix the fact that solstices and equinoxes were "sliding" from their original locations in the calendar, due to the fact that Earth's orbit around the Sun did not take place in an even 365 days. The extra six hours meant that, every four years, the calendar was "off" by an entire day. "Everyone knows" that the extra day was added to the end of February, creating February 29th every four years.

Except it wasn't.

Truth is, it just wasn't that simple. The standard Roman year at the time of Julius was 355 days. A "intercalary month" was added every three years or so to even things out and restore some normalcy to the spacing of festivals. The new year started on 1 March, and so the "extra month," which was called Mercedonius, was inserted prior to 1 March.

But that would throw things off even more—adding that month made those years 377-8 days long. So that the year would not get too long, they shortened February to just a little over three weeks. A year that needed Mercedonius had a February that ended on the 23rd. Why the 23rd? because that was Terminalia, the festival of Terminus, god of boundaries, and therefore a fitting end to the month.

Julius realized that this was a mess of overcorrecting for the astronomical inequality, and so he demanded that his scholars figure out what the calendar needed. They shifted some months, rewarded him for his wisdom by naming the seventh month after him, and told him the calendar could be kept stable by adding a single day every 4th year.

But where to add it?

Well, since inserting a correction in February was already a common practice, why not there? Excellent! So it was added—right after the day after Terminalia. There was no interest, however, in giving this new day its own identity—after all, it was only going to be around every four years, so who would count on it? Therefore, instead of calling it 24 February, they called it bis septum [Latin: "twice sixth"] because 24 February would have been the sixth day before the Kalends of March, so they would simply have 24th February repeated.

Therefore, even after the Leap Day was introduced into February, there was no 29 February until the Middle Ages, with the widespread European adoption of a sequential system of numbering, rather than counting forward and backward from the Ides and Kalends of the Roman system.