The Old English Menologium, a short calendar poem that appears uniquely in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. i, opens with a rhetorical flourish offering notice of the Nativity:1
In addition to marking the birth of Christ, this long clause initiates the forward movement through the year that characterizes the remainder of the poem as it notes the arrivals of the months and seasons, significant solar dates, and liturgical observances; the poet situates the audience firmly in “midwinter” before jumping ahead eight days to Christ's circumcision, an event, as the poem notes, during which a child was named. Beginning with a singular historical event that occurred in the past and then progressing forward eight days, the poem immediately demonstrates its engagement with two temporal understandings, time's cycle and time's arrow. In his account of the intellectual history of deep time, Stephen Jay Gould discusses these temporal metaphors.3 Time's...