computus

The calculation of the date of Easter in the Christian calendar.

An elaborate bundle of techniques called computus therefore developed around Easter calculations. Computus formed the centerpiece of “scientific” education in the monasteries.

Bede's work, which remained in active use for half a millennium, stood at the very center of the university curriculum, because the mastery of computus included many different essential subjects such as astronomy, mathematics, geography, theology, and law; its applications, too, included medicine and agriculture.

A book of tables for calculating dates of astronomical events and moveable feasts.

1987, Bruce Eastwood, 5: Plinian astronomical diagrams in the early Middle Ages, Edward Grant, John Emery Murdoch, Mathematics and Its Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages, page 149, This computus also contains only one completed Plinian diagram, that for the planetary harmonic intervals.

Prognostics have thus been discovered in computi, in volumes on science or medicine, and in miscellanies which present a host of different text genres.