Calendoscope

The Calendoscope is not a physical tool, but rather a database developed by the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT) in France. It is an online digital method used by researchers and scholars of medieval studies in order to analyze, compare, and identify the geographical origin and ate of medieval liturgical calendars.

The Calendoscope is intended to help specialists in the analysis and the identification of liturgical calendars of the Middle Ages.

Only a very small number of tools have been developed so far for this very purpose. Therefore it is generally necessary to resort to lists that have been compiled with a view towards hagiography, a science whose concerns are quite different from the liturgical approach required in the analysis of calendars and sanctorals. Moreover, the few existing tools are particularly uneasy to handle due to their conventional book form, which constrains their users to jump permanently from one calendar to another, from alphabetical lists to day-by-day summaries or to indices of sources, etc .

The Calendoscope has been developed in order to remedy these inconveniences.

For every day of the year, it provides instantly the list of the saints registered on this day in the various available calendars.

For every saint registered in this corpus, it provides instantly a list of the calendars where it can be found on a certain day, with the possibility to review comprehensively the contents of each of them.

A memorizing facility is provided to keep trace of the calendars that offer a combination of specific features. By repeated eliminations it is thus possible to determine which of them is best related to one calendar of unknown origin.

The basic documentation currently consists in 515 calendars (either manuscript or printed in the early 16th century), which provide 4,500 distinct "celebrations" (i.e. mention of a certain saint on a particular day) witnessed by over 160,000 entries.

This tools is provided in Beta version. In case of bugs or for any problems, send an email to cyril.masset@cnrs-orleans.fr

First version of the Calendoscope is still available here : http://calendoscope-old.irht.cnrs.fr