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f we are writers who want to give an accurate depiction of medieval life, we need to be true to its rhythms: the seasons of planting, growing and harvesting; the church calendar of feast- and fast-days; the church bells (as Denise Domning wrote about in the October 2009 issue of The Medieval Chronicle) and, perhaps the most basic to our minds, sunrise and sunset.

We also need to recognize how much the rhythms of the moon played a role in their lives. Because of the infringement of city and traffic lights, most of us have no idea of the immense splendour of the night sky, especially for people whose only other source of night time lighting was the flame from a candle or hearth-fire. Weather permitting, the moon could provide lighting for a task that our medieval heroes and villains were unable to perform during the day. But to write of medieval moon-ruled characters is not a matter of merely transposing our electrically-enhanced routines onto their castles or hovels. We need to know the nature of the moon.

Remember those diagrams in textbooks from elementary school showing how the moon reflects the sun as it revolves around the earth? Those are handy to have as reference; or you can bookmark websites such as www.moonconnection.com (whose diagram is, unfortunately, anti-clockwise). One of the best titles I have come across for moon-lore is The Lunar Effect:  Biological Tides and Human Emotions by Arnold L. Liebner (Anchor Press 1978). But, handy as these references are for us writers, we still have to know how to interpret them when we write of medieval armies on forced marches or medieval lovers trysting by crenellated ramparts.

Three immutable moon-rules we need to keep in mind are: 

First, the moon travels across the sky in the same direction as does the sun. Unlike the sun, however, which rises and sets each day within a minute of yesterday’s time, and within a degree of yesterday’s place on the horizon, the moon not only seems to wander all over but it rises fifty minutes later each twenty-four hour period. What this means is that, if the moon rises precisely at sunset one night, the next night there will be noticeable darkness before it rises almost an hour later; and the same for the following night until, a week later, it is rising at midnight. So if you have a medieval alchemist planning a week-long experiment for moonrise, he is going to have to sleep-in longer during the day as the week progresses.

The second moon-rule for writers is each phase of the moon follows in sequence. At new moon, the light is just beginning to show on the moon’s surface, and over the course of the next two weeks, it increases (always from right to left) in what are known as the ‘waxing’ phases until full moon is reached for about three days. Then, in the ‘waning’ phases, it is the dark that begins to increase on the moon’s surface, again from right to left, until there are three days when no moon is visible.

And the third moon-rule to know is that the time of moonrise and moonset is consistent with its phase. A moon that rises throughout the night is in the waning phase. A medieval night watch guard would observe a noticeable decrease in the area of lighted surface over the course of the next two weeks. Each night there would be less of the moon to see, and fewer hours to observe it in. At midnight a waning half-moon would rise and he would know that his watch was over when it reached its zenith overhead at the approach of morning. A dawn rising is known as an old moon where the last vestige of light appears on the left curve, making the capital letter C (which, when added to the word ‘old’ forms the word ‘cold’). Our weary medieval guard, longing for his bed by then, might sometimes see the most delicate silver ring hanging low in the eastern sky. Known as ‘the new moon in the old moon’s arms’, it is visible for less than an hour, if that.

 

 

 

 

The average medieval person probably would not know that the dark of the moon is caused by the moonrise coinciding with the sunrise. All they would know is that, after a period of one or two days, suddenly the moon appears in the western sky at eventide. For an hour or two, the lucky medieval traveler could watch the new moon sink lower and lower from his bed; the unlucky one would still be searching desperately for a place to rest. Each night after that, the moon waxes. When it reaches the half-moon phase, having risen at noon, it can light up the western sky for the first half of the night until it sets. After two weeks, medieval children would quite likely make a game of turning their backs on the sunset to see who would be first to sight the rise of the full moon.

My favourite website for a visual moon calendar (as opposed to a digital one such as supplied by the US Department of National Defence) is www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk, which also provides British historical and folklore information—well worth bookmarking. Another site, www.timeanddate.com, will let you create an historical calendar complete with moon phases. For a writer of medieval times, this will help you to avoid mistakes such as I made in my first draft where the post-battle scenes took place under the light of the full moon – a fortnight ahead of time.

As a writer, you may decide not to be this accurate, but as a medieval writer, you need to be accurate about the importance of the moon for medieval people. It was not only a secondary source of lighting for them. For some, unless they were clerics or monastics with offices of prayer to perform, they could use it to calculate the hour (or as close as would have been satisfactory to them). Just as we would look askance at a mainstream writer who places Tuesday after Wednesday, so we should reconsider a writer of medieval times who claims the moon always rises as soon as the sun sets.

 

 

 

Editor's Note: Visit NASA's website at  eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/phase/phasecat to get the moon's phases for both BCE and CE for each month of a specific year.    

 

 

Nela Leja is currently re-writing her novel about the death of James III of Scotland.  She attributes her fascination with the Middle Ages to childhood years spent partly in Cambridge, England and can remember being beset by the question of how people managed to live without electricity. Nela wrote and illustrated her first book at the age of five. With a BA in English literature, she spends her time sporadically launching a writing career between the inevitably various, challenging and grueling day-jobs. Nela is the Canadian membership co-coordinator for the Historical Novel Society. 

 

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