A Brill Calendar: April 25

"1492"

Few books carry a title which doesn’t need translation in order to be understood in any language.

In the surfeit of books written by the French intellectual and public phenomenon Jacques Attali (Algiers, November 1 1943) one work, entitled ‘1492’, is such an exception, .

It is a publication without an under-title; perhaps it doesn’t come as a surprise that the Librairie Arthème Fayard published this work of the erstwhile ‘Conseiller special auprès du president de la République’, in 1991, on the eve of the quincentennial celebration of Columbus’s first voyage of discovery to Asia (albeit in an 'innovative' direction).

‘1492’ is divided in three parts. The first is entitled ‘Inventer l’Europe’; and the third ‘Inventer ‘l’Histoire’. The ‘trait-d’union’ is carrying the title of the book as a whole; and it is, quite plausibly, divided in twelve chapters, opening up with ‘Janvier’ and closing down with ‘Décembre’. From the blurb, translated by yours truly: ‘Europe discovers tobacco, the potato and syphilis. In Salamanca the first grammar book in a vulgar tongue is printed. Venice is stepping down from the heart of the World’s economy, to make place for Antwerp […] 1492: a decisive year of bifurcation in which a modern Europe is born.’

Attali mentions in an ‘Avertissement’ that all calendar days in the book until October 1582 follow the Julian reckoning; in that year the 4th of that month was followed by the 15th of October, on the authority of Pope Gregory. No intellectual – particularly not a French one – can deal with ‘1492’ without mentioning much later years.

Even the emergence of humanist scholarship in the Low Countries doesn’t escape Gallic ‘finesse’, scrutiny and perspective, as witnessed on page 213 : ‘On Wednesday April 25 an obscure young Dutchman with the name Geertsz is ordained a priest in the monastery of Steyn; he will leave it under the name Erasmus to become secretary to the Bishop of Cambrai.’ It is seldom that explicit mentioning of a specific day of the week has such a curious expressive effect 517 years later.