Thematic Events


Calendars and Festivals: Identity, Culture, and Experience


Our experience of time in the Western world is based on the interplay of a weekly structure and annual festivals. Its origins lie in religious traditions. Thus, the seven-day week featuring one day that is set apart is Judaism’ s lasting contribution to time reckoning. Its ultimate success in the West was mediated through the adoption of the Hellenistic Planetary Week in Rome. Annual festivals are ‘appointed Time;’ borrowing the language of spatiality, they ‘enter’ and ‘exit’ (so e.g. in Hebrew, Latin or German), or, conversely, can be ‘entered’ (cf. German ‘ein Fest begehen).’ Unlike Bank Holidays, each festival has its own particularity that differentiates it from the others.


The project Calendars and Festivals: Identity, Culture, and Experience has two phases. The first phase is aimed at the broader public and consists of a series of public lectures. Covering the major Western calendrical structures and landmarks (e.g. the Roman calendar, Christmas, and Easter), regional interest (e.g. the Venerable Bede’s contribution to time-reckoning), as well as related and alternative models (e.g. Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Chinese festivals), the series provides self- recognition, cultural comment, and cross-cultural awareness to a public that is ever more drawn into


a 24/7 indistinctiveness of time, in which socially co- ordinated rituals have begun to lose their time and place. Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences has an important role here, with potential ‘impact’ on social and political praxis. These lectures will be delivered by some of the foremost specialists in their fields from the UK, Europe, and overseas. Several events in cooperation with the cultural programme Is It Time? are also planned.


The second phase is a research programme on the construction of time in antiquity. Time as shaped by calendars and festivals is a culturally encoded entity that both defines, and participates in, the local manifestations of the culture that constructs it. As the example of the Jewish week culminating in the Sabbath shows, major landmarks of time as engendered in concrete historical circumstances develop into larger hubs of constructed time across wider historical and national circumstances. Other examples include the Olympic games or the ancient


Mesopotamian akītu festivals. These landmarks of time often accumulate other rituals, leading to symbolic systems decoding the meaning of societies and validating their identity. The project continues recent interdisciplinary research into ancient calendars and festivals.


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