Writing Poetry In The Stars: The Influence Of Computistical Learning On Selected Old English Poems

The study of computus (a discipline whose object is calculating an appropriate date for Easter in the Christian liturgical calendar) was a core component of education in early medieval Britain, one which every priest and monk was required to be familiar with at least in part. They would likely have learned about some of the major computistical disputes from Christendom’s earlier centuries, which had given the discipline soteriological associations so strong that some writers even depicted computistical study as a quasi-medicinal practice contingent on the computist’s own benevolence co-operating with God’s divine grace. At a minimum all scribes (writing both in Old English and Latin) would have at some point received a rudimentary education in computistical matters, even if the texts they were transmitting may have been authored by people lacking such an education or were even the products of an oral tradition. However, because Latin and Old English divided time into different units (and at times even arranged the year according to different calendars), computistical texts written in Old English occasionally make use of time reckonings different to the Roman calendar which provided organizing structure for the Christian liturgical year. A survey of the surviving poetic corpus in Old English - and Old Saxon - reveals that beliefs around time and temporality originating in the study of computus manifest in several of our surviving poems (especially those of a religious nature). The study of computus then had cultural impacts much further-reaching than the practical task of furnishing appropriate dates for moveable feasts within the liturgical calendar, which might help explain why it remained a compulsory area of study for monks and priests in early medieval Europe long after Bede’s Great Easter Table had provided orthodox dates for the next few centuries.