Happy April — it's time to have more fun with the calendar pages of Additional MS 36684! If you’ve missed it, find out more information on the manuscript in January’s post, and for more on medieval calendars, check out our original calendar post from 2011.

Calendar pages for April, from a Book of Hours, St Omer or Théouranne, c. 1320, Add MS 36684, ff. 4v–5r

April is a fruitful month of rebirth, according to Chaucer’s famous opening to his Canterbury Tales (which he wrote about 80 years after this calendar was produced). Fittingly, our labour of the month can be seen merrily pruning a healthy, green plant at the bottom of the page. We especially like the small hybrid figure sporting a full set of stag antlers next to him, and the figures with dinosaur bodies in the margin below.

Detail of the labour of the month for April, Add MS 36684, f. 4v

Equally fittingly, the artist underscores the idea of April as a fertile month at the start of the calendar with the appearance of two nude frolickers. On the far right of the page, we have a lady reaching up to touch a branch above her, and on the left, another figure, modesty protected by the border, who has unfortunately been decapitated by a later owner when they had the pages trimmed. 

Detail of a nude woman, Add MS 36684, f. 4v

On the facing page, our zodiac figure for April is the bull Taurus, merrily contemplating the trumpeting dogs outside his miniature Gothic niche.

Detail of Taurus, Add MS 36684, f. 5r

The calendar pages include the usual notes of specific saints’ feast days, and we can also take a guess as to the date of Easter, arguably the most significant Christian feast day, during at least part of the time the manuscript was in use. There is a colophon dated to 1318 on f. 78r of the manuscript, and we can compute that Easter Sunday fell on 23 April in 1318.

As a reminder, you can see all of Additional MS 36684 online on Digitised Manuscripts. We hope you are all frolicking as happily as our marginal figures!  

Taylor McCall
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