Calendar Description

This is a work in progress and the results are still being assessed.

The Christian Liturgical year is a cyclic calendar of feast days. It is comprised of fixed and moveable seasons, the moveable seasons being based on the calculation of Easter Sunday for that year.

Each Sunday throughout the year is named. A number is assigned to each possible week. Because the seasons vary in length, some numbers will be skipped in any given year. This numbering system is unique to the Cal library - input and output would normally be through the text descriptions.

This version is based on the Julian Calendar.

Use Case

This version of the Christian Liturgical calendar, together with Saints Days, have been used to date documents, particularly (but not confined to) Church documents, since the fourth century.

This version was replaced by the Gregorian Liturgical Calendar as the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian one.

Definition

The Julian Liturgical scheme is a variation of the Julian scheme and has the same definition except that it includes the Optional Fields litweek and wday. These, together with the standard Fields year, month and day are ranked into the order shown in the Record above.

The litweek Field has a value assigned to it as in the above table. Typically it is the Sunday that is named, but here we use it to name the whole weeek. Thus, together with the wday Field, we can define any day of the year.

Note that the litweek number has no meaning outside of the HistoryCal project, they are simply used to provide a coherent scheme.

All other details of the scheme are the same as the Julian scheme.

Script

The grammar is dependant on the 7 day Week and the Julian Month vocabs.