Lunar Eclipse

Early this morning (as in, from 2:30-4:30 a.m.) my part of the world was treated to a near-total lunar eclipse. The shadow of the earth crept across the full moon’s surface, eventually turning it a reddish color (due to the refraction of light through the Earth’s shadow). As anyone who has seen a lunar eclipse like this before knows, it is indeed an unearthly sight.

Following the changing constellations is something that most pre-Industrial peoples would have been able to do easily. Keeping track of the planets was much harder. And being able to predict eclipses — especially when most people thought the sun and moon orbited the earth — was extremely difficult and the purveyance of only the uppermost intellectuals of the day.

The Early Medieval British, like many, considered the unexpected occlusion of the moon an eerie and foreboding occasion. The _Anglo-Saxon Chronicles_ remark on several with horrified descriptions. For instance, one chronicler wrote: “the moon was as though drenched with blood,” about a lunar eclipse in 734 CE. Referring to another in 1110, an entry reads: ” . . . And on the night of December 11th, the moon was long into the night as though all bloody, and after, it was darkened”. Frequently, those who saw eclipses thought they were portents of ill tidings.

But what you see here is different — it is a page out of a folding almanac, which could predict the movements of the heavenly bodies. Made in the 1400s, it was a copy of the scholar John Somer’s _Kalendarium_ written originally in the previous century. You can see here the phases of a lunar eclipse explained. Physicians would have carried it folded on their belts, their scientific diagrams contrasting with the astrology that informed their practice.