The Date of Easter and Shakespeare’s ‘Progress of the Stars’: Creed and Chronometry in the Sixteenth Century

William Shakespeare\u27s Julius Caesar opens with the question Is this a holiday? followed by another, What, know you not? The queries seem benign and, perhaps, humorless four centuries after the drama about the assassination of the ancient Roman emperor premiered at the Globe Theater in 1599, but – within a century of King Henry VIII\u27s start of the Church of England (1534) – chronometry was a grave matter of church and state. Shakespeare\u27s first Roman play coincided with the worst span of controversy between the Vatican and Canterbury, and Flavius\u27s questions reveal social rubs between churches and calendars in late Elizabethan England. Chronometry pops up throughout the play, so here I highlight how post-Reformation, Catholic-vs.-Protestant aggressions were a likely source of Shakespeare\u27s Caesarian punctuations regarding time

On Liturgy and Lectionary: The Word of Life in the Body of Christ

In 1843 the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Patrick Kenrick, wrote to the Public School Board of Controllers to ask that Catholic children be spared reading of the Protestant Bible [the King James Version, KJV] and that anti-Catholic vitriol be excised from textbooks of the public schools. Historians focus on the translation divide – the Protestant King James Version versus the Catholic Douai-Rheims – but the issue closer to the heart of the matter was ritual formation (and malformation) of Christian believers, well-heeled Protestants versus poor Catholics. What happened in summer 1844, I suggest, was more accurately Rite Riots rather than Bible Riots, as they are usually tagged; the toll was grave: at least fifteen dead, fifty injured