VIII
DATES IN COLOPHONS
Dates form such an important feature in colophons that this essay cannot be brought to a close without some attempt to explain the difficulties which arise in connection with them. As regards the method of expressing the year there is very little to say. Theodoric Rood (see page 61) preferred to speak of 1485 as the 297th Olympiad from the birth of Christ, being under the impression that Olympiads consisted of five years instead of four. Other printers showed great ingenuity in finding elaborate synonyms for what we are now content to express in the two words “Anno Domini,” and among other phrases employed “Olympiades Dominicae” (see page 79), but without any attempt to introduce the intervals between the Olympic Games into the Christian reckoning.
As an additional method of dating we occasionally find a reference to the year of the indiction, a method of dating by cycles of fifteen years, instituted by the Emperor Constantine in 312. To find the indictional year, 312 must be subtracted from the year of the Lord (the same results will be obtained by adding 3), and then after dividing by 15, the remainder will give the number of the year in the indiction. Thus (1488-312)/15 or (1488+3)/15 in each case leaves a remainder of six, and A.D. 1488 was thus the sixth indiction.
According to different methods of reckoning, indictions began in September or October, at Christmas or on January 1st. In colophons, I believe, they are always used in conjunction with years of the Lord reckoned from January 1st, and they have only the effect of a chronological flourish.
A much more important supplementary method of dating is that by the names of ruling popes, emperors, sovereigns, or princes, or still better by their regnal years. I have long cherished an ambition to compile a kind of “Bibliographer’s Vade-mecum,” one section of which would be devoted to exhaustive lists of the smaller as well as the greater sovereigns of Europe during the period when their names in old books are of chronological value. Here, however, it must suffice to offer lists of popes, kings of England and France, and doges of Venice, for the periods which concern us, and to use these as illustrations of the way in which such information can be brought to bear on the dating of early books.
POPES