Unfolding Concertina-Fold Almanacs: The Making of an Exhibition

Unfolding Time: The Medieval Pocket Calendar, an exhibition presently on view at Lambeth Palace Library in London, explores ideas about time in the middle ages through the concertina-fold almanac, a rare and remarkable book type introduced in the fourteenth century. Concertinas are formed of oblong parchment strips, folded lengthwise and then in an accordion or concertina pattern. Cuts in the parchment allow different sections to be accessed without unfolding the entire sheet. People in medieval Europe tracked time through planetary motion, seasonal shift, historic events, and religious celebrations. Concertina-fold almanacs illuminate and align these varied cycles. In them, time is vividly expressed in colorful pictures, poems, tables, and devices. Just twenty-nine of these extremely fragile folded manuscripts are known to survive; the Lambeth exhibition brings a selection together, for the first time. In this talk, Sarah Griffin, curator of the exhibition, and Megan McNamee, a collaborator, will introduce the concertina corpus and discuss the process of putting these frighteningly fragile, fiendishly complex, and wonderfully dynamic little books on public view. They will also share some of the tools they developed to make the concertinas and temporalities that they embody understandable and exciting to seven- and seventy-year olds alike.