ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Recasting the History of Almanacs 1

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session examines how almanacs and calendars became integral to the daily lives of early modern Europeans. Moving to and fro between household, printing house, and the annotated page, the session reframes almanacs as sites where labour, gender, and mathematical and reading practices materialised on paper. The session draws attention to almanacs as dense nodal points where different disciplinary approaches—iconographic analysis, business history, gender studies, book history, and the study of marginalia—must be brought into conversation. They invite us to reconsider what an “almanac” is: not simply an annual compendium of information, but a material format around which labour and temporal experience were organised, a surface where visual and verbal conventions are continuously renegotiated, and a space in which subordinated actors leave their marks. By juxtaposing English, German, and Polish–Lithuanian case studies, the session also foregrounds the plurality of almanac cultures in early modern Europe while tracing shared practices across regions and confessions. In doing so, it contributes to broader conference themes of shifting perspectives and knowledge forms, suggesting that to understand early modern worlds we must pay close attention to how people lived with almanacs: making them, selling them, annotating them, and relying on them to structure both cosmic and domestic time.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Michelle Pfeffer, University of Oxford

Individual Presentations

• Almanacks as an Epistemic Tool: Negotiating Cosmological Knowledge through Text and Image in Seventeenth-Century England - Barbara Bienias, Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences

• Written Lives in Printed Time: Rethinking the Use and Function of Almanacs in Early Modern Poland–Lithuania - Jakub Ochocinski, EUI

• Almanac production as a household enterprise in Early Modern Britain and Germany - Isobel Falconer, University of St Andrews

Session Organizers

• Isobel Falconer, University of St Andrews

• Sergio Orozco-Echeverri, Universidad de Antioquia / I Tatti, Harvard University