Chris Carrier wrote:

>I really have a problem with badmouthing the Gregorian Calendar.  Pre-
>scientific though it may be, invented by men who denied the true nature
>of the solar system, yes -- but it has withstood the test of time.
 

I have already given the group SOME of my views on why it has withstood the test
of time. To Chris's litany of their (Pope Gregory and Clavius) sins I respond
"This is the least of it!"

Christopher Clavius S.J. may have denied the physical truth of Copernicus'
hypothesis in his early writings, but he was actually one of the more
open-minded astronomers about this issue. In his last years he
defended, a now openly Copernican, Galileo and acknowledged that the new
telescopic findings concerning Venus' phases required that "astronomers see how
the celestial spheres must be constituted in order to save the phenomena"
(translated by Suter and Sciascia from Pasquale D'Elia S.J. on pages 85-86 of
his 1960 English edition (of his original Italian essay) "Galileo in China", out
of the Latin "Opera Mathematica" of C.Clavius vol.III of the Mainz 1611
edition)*.

Moreover by including, in his last book of his "Opera Mathematica", a reprint of
the "Compendium", Clavius acknowledged that Gregory's commission on the calendar
(in which he, Clavius, had held the senior post, as regards the technical
aspects) had taken care to promote their reform proposal as, adaptable to the
Copernican theory ("...this ingenious Cycle...can easily be adapted....,as for
example we have set out this one, differing not much from the theory of
Copernicus", Clavius' quote from the Compendium, translated by Noel M. Swerdlow
in his article "The Length of the Year in the Original Proposal for the
Gregorian Calendar", Journal for the History of Astronomy, JHA xvii, 1986,
p112)**.

As for "pre-scientific", I would rather say "proto-scientific", relying on a
notion of "modern scientific method" as incorporating the elements of inspired
theorizing, utilising mathematical analysis of reproducible empirical data, with
peer review, and Popperian "falsifiability" of working hypotheses.
While "peer review" in the 1580's was a rather agressive affair, readily
confused by political and ideological divergencies, and the nascent concept of
the reproducibility and comparison of data, was better practiced by the
Protestants under the Landgrave William "the wise", we must give the jesuit
intellectuals some credit for (initially at least) protecting and nurturing such
heretics as Kepler and Galileo, even if the reasons may have been pragmatic and
ultimately political.
 

As for MY litany of THEIR sins (Pope Gregory XIII and Christoph. Clavius):

I will say right now, that my working hypothesis is, that they passed up the
PERFECT Calendar (perfect by the very standards with which they justified the
adopted reform), which was handed to them on a silver platter (by a Syrian
Patriarch, whom they appear to have bribed and blackmailed into silence) and
then instituted a calendar which they knew to be inferior in most every respect
(and which turns out actiually to be inferior in every respect), apparently for
purely political reasons!

But I will begin with a personal story that parallels Chris' following note:
>(Personal note: My surname is the same as one of the most bloodthirsty
>characters from the French Revolution.  (No, I'm not related.) When in high
>school history class the fact the Revolution had its own calendar came up, the
>whole class had a good laugh at my expense.  Nowadays, of course, it's
>expected that alumni-related correspondence from me be 'double dated'.)

After being well along in my research, of this Counter-Reformation "Calendar
War" as I had christened it, I discovered that my house-mate claims blood
descent from Gaspar de Coligny. Gaspar I learned was a Protestant, a high
Admiral of France and leader of the French Hugenots, murdered in the infamous
"St. Bartholemew's Day" "Paris Massacre" of 1572. Some accounts claim that this
treacherous "Massacre at Paris" (of Protestant wedding-guests) by the Catholic
citizenry was instigated by the Italian witch, Catherine De Medici, upon advice
from her jesuit councillors, specifically to get rid of Gaspar whom she tried to
kill once or twice before the wholesale massacre finally acheived her goal (an
excellent but gory cinematic dramatization of Alexander Dumas' version of this
story was released last year and is now on videotape, "Queen Margot"). Other
versions have Gaspar's head delivered to Rome, and presented to the gleeful,
newly-elected Pope, GREGORY XIII! (see Gordon Moyer's mathematically flawed
article "The Gregorian Calendar" in Scientific American CCXLVI, May 1982 p144).
Upon further research, I discovered that the young Sir Phillip Sydney's
attitudes to the Catholic League were traumatically imprinted upon his young
mind by being forced to witness this butchery of his co-religionists while he
too was a guest at the sham peace-marriage of Henri de Navarre and the Italian
witch's daughter. John Dee's friend and co-conspirator, Francis Walsingham,
later to manage England's foreign policy and nascent Intelligence Service, was
ambassador in Paris at the time. Dee himself, just the year before, on a secret
mission to the Duchy of Lorraine (probably concerning the infamous Cardinal of
Lorraine, founder member of the Catholic League, and/or the Italian witch's
other plot, to marry one of her sons to Dee's own Queen, Elizabeth) was taken
seriously ill. Probably in fear of Dee's poisoning at the hands of Catholic
Leaguer's, Queen Elizabeth sent two of her own doctors abroad to him.("The
Queene did fear for my life if I had to attende me foreygn physitians" as Dee
put it). These Englishmen whom I discovered had been scarred in 1571 and 1572 by
French Catholic Leaguer's reactions to Gaspar's rise to prominence, were the
very persons I had just discovered plotting a partly secret English response to
Pope Gregory's Calendar Reform, some ten years later!

Moreover I had just connected Dee's calendar reform activities with Raleigh's
and Harriot's and White's attempts (1584-1587) to colonise what is now Eastern
Carolina. I then learned, in my reading around Admiral Gaspar, that the jesuits
wished Gaspar prevented from taking up again, the Hugenot colonisation of what
is now South Carolina. In 1572, the jesuits were anxious about a particular
American project. This was an attempt to recement a claim to the continental
coast, north of Spanish Florida, for the Catholic states. The jesuits had sent
an ill-starred mission to the Powhatan confederation of Native Americans (See
David B. Quinn's "New American World" vol II, Ch.39 "The jesuit Mission on
Chesapeake Bay 1570-1571").

One of Ralegh's closest confidants in the "Virginia Enterprise" (which he took
over when Dee left for the continent in 1583), was Jacques LeMoyne De Morgue, a
Hugenot who had fled the murderous Catholic League to England in 1572, who was
an artist like John White, and had experienced for himself the Hugenot's
attempts to colonise this disputed coast, being "one of the survivors of the
Rene de Laudonniere colony, which was established in Spanish Florida by the
French and destroyed by the Spanish in September 1565" (according to John L.
Humber in his 1986 book "Backgrounds and Preparation for the Roanoke voyages,
1584-1590").

All this activity, that I was discovering through the Gaspar connection, on or
close to the longitude of Jamestown, was icing on the cake for my newborn
working hypothesis. This hypothesis, first stated publicly by me at a lecture at
the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness, March 3rd. 1994, was,
that there was a secret, "school-of-night" Khayyam-style calendar-reform
initiative and that the first English American-colony-projects, Raleigh's,
Harriot's and White's "Old Virginia" (and possibly Jamestown), were at least
partly motivated by the resulting calendrical significance of the longitudes of
these places.

I have since found confirming evidence in the unpublished papers of Thomas
Harriot, archived at the British Library, Spanish documents, archived at Seville
and Vatican studies on Gregory's only Oriental calendar commissioner, the Syrian
Nestorian Patriarch Na'amat allah.

When, just last month I read in William S. Powell's "Roanoke Colonists and
explorers: an attempt at identification" (The North Carolina Historical Review
v.XXXIV Apr.1957 #2 p225), that two of John White's lost colonists shared my
genetic father's name "Ellis" and that an Ellis' brother-in-law, John Pory, was
one of the very few Jamestowners who made any attempt to solve the mystery of
White's "Lost Colony" (by searching in what is now Gates County, North Carolina,
in 1622), I was primed to respond rather too effusively, when invited to discuss
Calendars and their Reform, on the EAST CAROLINA University Calendar Discussion
List!

Perhaps yet more of us, in this discussion group have apparent karmic destinies
interwoven with their scholarly interest in the history of calendar reform!

That is probably more than enough for this contribution, though I have a lot
more to say about Chris' interesting thoughts, next time.

**Swerdlow's research highlights the extent to which Gregory's calendar experts
relied upon Copernicus (at least upon the popularity of his tables if not
overtly upon his physical theory). This finding can throw light upon two
intriguing mysteries and thereby contradict Swerdlow's own judgemental comment
in JHA v,1974,p49,note 2 "...the calendar reform literature is on the whole
'interesting to few and entertaining to none', and a scholar of sense will
readily turn to other labours rather than cultivate this barren field"!! ASK AND
YOU SHALL RECEIVE! ("New light on the Galileo affair and the English mission of
Giordano Bruno" S.Cassidy in progress)

* Giordano Bruno held that "translation is the mother of all wisdom" or words to
that effect. While, I agree with Bruno, in as much as he meant that, translation
of an idea from one cultural viewpoint into another (e.g. from one language into
another) tends to winnow out the dross (dross = cultural idiosyncracies which
are not understandable to a foreign viewpoint and therefore are either not
chosen for translation or cannot plausibly survive the attempt),  I persomally
find the Babel of languages that constitute the cultural heritage of the West,
extremely irksome, especially when, as here, I have to cite a translation of a
translation in order to source my claim.
However I must acknowledge, a la Bruno, that this babble/Babel was probably
another instrumental contribution to the historical transition  which now
fascinates me so much (that of western culture from Renaissance to
Enlightenment).

"He sort of asked for it, I sort of answered"!, Please excuse my humor.
--
Yours, Simon Cassidy, 1053 47th.St. Emeryville Ca.94608,. ph.510-547-0684.