About this Book

"Give us our eleven days!" is one of the best-known slogans of the eighteenth century and yet it is also one of the least understood. Opening with the first historical study of the near legendary English calendar riots of 1752, the author goes on to offer a wide-ranging social and cultural history of the early modern calendar from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries: the English rejection of the Gregorian calendar in 1883; the calendar and the "battle for merry England"; science, religion and the calendar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the impact of the 1752 calendar reform on government, fairs, calendar customs and popular politics and culture.