Bede: The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione)

Bede's The Reckoning of Time, in Faith Wallis's scholarly translation, is a primary eighth century treatise on computus, the method for calculating the date of Easter and other movable religious observances, written by one of the most careful scholars of the early medieval church. As the actual founding text of Western Christian calendrical reckoning, it carries direct authority for how the early medieval church understood and taught the mathematics of sacred time. Wallis's translation adds extensive scholarly apparatus situating Bede's method within earlier Alexandrian and Roman computistical traditions, so the volume functions as both primary source and modern critical guide. Its limit is genre, a technical manual rather than a theological argument, so it says little about lay devotional experience of the calendar it describes.