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This chapter seeks to explore the meaning of impartiality for Kepler, and the ways in which he understood it as a virtue that applied to mathematicians in particular. It does so by focusing on Kepler’s engagement with the disputes over the Gregorian calendar reform and the acceptance of the Gregorian calendar throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Kepler highlighted impartiality as a view from everywhere, one that implied tolerance. He used a dialogue he wrote on the question of calendar reform in order both to suggest the manner in which the fissures in Christendom could be repaired, and also to offer a specific model for a kind of churchly unity, one that did not depend on absolute agreement on points of doctrine between the confessions.

Chapter 4 (“Out-Dating”) examines how the telegraph “out-dated” the Hijri Muslim calendar, telescoping it into the sphere of religion. Arguably, the main arena for the telegraphic promotion of the Gregorian calendar (that replaced the Hijri one) was the emerging Egyptian press from the 1870s and onward. Yet in Egypt this process did not necessarily homogenize time: newspaper readers in Cairo and Alexandria, cities that were directly connected to Europe via submarine telegraph, read yesterday’s news from London or Paris, but news about the Egyptian countryside was sometimes two weeks old, because news from the country trickled in by mail. If the previous chapter contrasted middle-class time to the “superstitions” of the peasants, this chapter demonstrates how the formation of the Egyptian middle class also bears the mark of another temporal double standard, based on an uneven and uneasy set of relationships in which the action-packed Europe appeared closer than one’s seemingly remote and stagnate immediate surroundings.

This chapter offers a bird’s-eye view of the 100 years of debate that followed upon Regiomontanus’s death and culminated in the Gregorian Reform of 1582, focusing in particular on the time of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17) and the work carried out in the 1570s by a commission of experts convened by Pope Gregory XIII, which came to favour an intricate scheme for an astronomically accurate and freely adjustable calendar. Some attention is paid to the extent to which Copernican heliocentric astronomy may have influenced, or was influenced by, the ongoing discussions surrounding the calendar reform. At the same time, the key argument of this chapter is that the breakthrough achieved in the sixteenth century rested to a very large extent on premises, concepts, and insights first formulated during the preceding medieval centuries.

The fourth chapter centres on the Lutheran mayor Bartholomäus Scultetus (1540–1614) who introduced the Gregorian Calendar to Lusatia and the Bohemian lands. Other Lutheran territories, most notably Saxony, refused to accept the more accurate calendar on religious grounds. Scultetus, however, advocated for the calendar and exchanged letters with Catholic dignitaries, praising the benefits of a calendar reform. He dedicated multiple works to Catholics, was friends with some of them and even included woodcuts of his Catholic friends or their coat of arms in his works. Other examples of this cross-confessional exchange include a monk who was one of the most popular godfathers in Zittau until the 1540s or the peaceful negotiations between Lutheran town councils and Franciscan monks regarding new town schools. Scultetus and other councillors also engaged in the creation of a Reformation memory, but without a clear shape of Lutheranism, these histories did not follow a unified pattern.

This chapter examines other eighteenth-century cultural phenomena that may be considered correlative to the modernization of printing conventions. There are four major examples: the publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755, which attempted to provide set definitions, spelling, and pronunciation for words in the English language; the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, which placed Britain in synch with time-keeping on the continent and facilitated commerce and travel; the regulation of painted, hanging shop signs in London and the imposition of house numbers in Westminster beginning in 1762; and the evolution of the English language and of English prose, culminating in a more elegant, refined, and “written” form of prose than earlier in the century.

This book focuses on the apocalyptic mood that spread throughout the Muslim world in 1979. This spread is not surprising, especially considering that the year 1979 coincided with the turn to the fifteenth Islamic century. At that time, pious Muslims were on the lookout for the signs of the hour when the world would come to an end. They were looking out for the return of the Messiah, who would, after prolonged battle, triumph over the Great Deceiver, the Antichrist, who had taken over to rule the world. Although this apocalyptic mood rose and wore off almost cyclically, postponing the end of the world to the next turn of the century, this time it seemed as if the expectations were extraordinarily high. After all, quite a number of Muslims felt that the world had indeed become ruled by the Great Deceiver.