Eventually, in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, we are left with life in the present – no past and no future. I’m not there yet, but I can sense the shrinking timeline of memories from the past and plans for the future. For those of us on the Alzheimer’s journey, it is really important to embrace the moment and not dwell on the frustration of trying to remember the past and plan for the future. Others can help us retrieve old memories. Calendars, lists, and post-it notes will help us minimize the chaos of the future. But happiness and peace come from focusing on the moment, whether it is hugging a grandchild, writing in a journal, working in the garden, or listening to great music. As Horace put it over two thousand years ago, carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – seize the day and don’t worry about tomorrow.

A spiritually enveloping, time-consuming, and value-creating set of activities, Aztecs centered their religion on powerful spiritual beings. Ceremony and time were fundamental parts of everyday life. From the smallest household to the largest city, rituals of offering to the gods took place every day as Aztecs sought water, food, the survival of human life, and balance in what they perceived to be a chaotic spiritual and material world. In their dynamic universe, deities and their human embodiments and priests and priestesses manifested great power. Ceremonies conducted for those beings, the offerings presented to them, and exchanged or distributed provide examples of the power and energy that offerings, including living humans, provided. Time-keeping focused on the notion of progressive ages, the idea of cyclical time, and two calendar systems. Their calendars used two ways of keeping track of days and months for ceremonies, agriculture, and war. Aztecs drew blood for human and plant fertility, purification, and to nourish and repay their debt to the creator deities. Yet the greatest offering human beings could give was to provide human lives, offering hearts and blood, though they did not do so in the numbers often suggested.

Virgil promises a calendar of times and tasks in his Georgics, yet the temporal leaps in his poem take us far from steady calendrical form. This essay asks how his English inheritors have evoked repeated annual cycles while also expressing idiosyncratic understandings of time and local particularities of work. The first section argues that the medieval iconography of the ‘labours of the months’ provides an important and neglected context for study of georgic writing, and enquires into the parallel influence of another iconographic tradition: that of illustrations to Virgil. Subsequent sections focus on writers (including Thomas Tusser, Mary Collier, William Cowper and Ford Madox Ford) who develop literary forms for their calendrical material and in doing so question the very shape and meaning of rural life. Where are the year’s pivots and culminations, does it take different form for men and women, does it begin or end?

Hieradoumian tombstones – very unusually for Greek-language epitaphs – typically give the precise date of death in the format year, month, and day, and age at death is also very often specified. As a result, we have a large body of data for analyzing demographic patterns in the region. This chapter analyzes Hieradoumian patterns of seasonal mortality, broken down by sex and age. The results show both similarities and differences with other comparable datasets from other parts of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Infants and young children are heavily under-represented in the funerary record, as are (to a lesser extent) women. Since votive inscriptions are also often precisely dated, it is likewise possible to gain some sense of dominant seasonal patterns of religious activity in Roman Hieradoumia. The large number of dated epitaphs from the second-century AD allows us to trace the impact of the Antonine Plague in western Asia Minor; the chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the pathogens which may have shaped ‘normal’ seasonal mortality patterns in the region.

The messianic religions of late antiquity are obsessed with getting the time right, to know the right time – both at the level of daily, weekly, monthly or annual rituals, and at the level of world history. Where the prophet Cassandra can say for herself, ‘the day has come’, the Gospels will insist that everyone must be anxiously aware that ‘the hour is coming and is now here’. The desire to be certain about one’s place in time produces an extended, competitive and argumentative scholarly literature, which is never simply about the correct calibration of time. Rabbinical writing, first of all, is exemplary of these temporal obsessions.

In 1561 Elizabeth commanded that the liturgical calendar should be revised, because the Old Testament chapters assigned to each day included many that could profitably be replaced by more edifying ones. Because thousands of 1559 folio editions were already in use, Richard Jugge was commissioned to print cancel calendars that could be inserted to replace the obsolete ones. The revisions did not, however, really implement the queen’s wishes, because although thirty-five chapters were removed from the sequence, the only new insertion was Leviticus 26. More immediately noticeable, however, was a considerable increase in the number of saints’ days and fasts listed in the ‘miscellaneous’ column. Those additions have sometimes been interpreted as a resurgence of Catholic traditions, but it has seldom been noticed that most of them had already been added in the small-format ‘popular’ editions of 1552–53 by those unimpeachable Protestants, Grafton and Whitchurch.

This chapter interrogates one of the Museum’s prize objects, a late medieval English astrolabe, one of the earliest survivals of this type. Close analysis of the instrument’s specific design characteristics and engraved information is linked to recent scholarship on medieval astrolabe manufacture. Particular attention is paid to the often-overlooked back of the instrument, in particular its detailed calendar of Christian feast days, as a means of investigating the links between Christianity and scientific investigation, and between patrons, monasteries, and the universities in the medieval period.