Picking Flowers in a 13th Century Picture CalendarThis is a calendar page for June from a late thirt
Picking Flowers in a 13th Century Picture CalendarThis is a calendar page for June from a late thirteenth-century Psalter-Hours manuscript (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W.41, 4v), made for a Franciscan community in Cologne. Calendars are quite common in these kinds of books. They were used to keep track of all the religious holidays. The initials KL at the top are an abbreviation of ‘kalens’, the first day of the month. (Now you know where the word calendar comes from!) Just like nowadays medieval people liked illustrations to go with their calendars. Those illustrations were usually the zodiac signs and/or the labours of the month. This page shows the labour of June: a young man picking flowers. June is associated with harvest and the labour of June usually shows someone reaping wheat. This manuscript was used by Franciscans however, not farmers, so maybe June was the month when they picked the flowers and herbs they needed for seasoning or ointments? The round form of the illustration represents the circle of life. Every year the same labours are depicted for every month in the calendar, so the years form circles of recurring labours of the months. This is tells us that time was not just perceived as linear in the middle ages. - Koen Huigen -- source link
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