Mostly caught up on existing threads, slowly chipping away at my backlog of things I ran across in my reading during Yuletide.
So we've talked about how the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar happened gradually in Europe, meaning different countries were on different calendars at the same time. Catholic countries switched first, than gradually Protestant, and eventually Eastern Orthodox (Russia not until the Russian Revolution). So different dates are given for different events depending on who's reporting them, and if your event took place around the beginning of the year, you'll have different years, and don't even get me started on having March 25 as the first day of your new year.
But I thought I was on top of this, confusing as it is, until I learned in November that Sweden decided to make things extra complicated! From Henrik Lunde's A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Decline of Sweden as a Military Superpower:
Sweden did not begin making the change to the Gregorian calendar until 1700 and, to make matters worse, it was done in a confusing and halting manner. The Swedish calendar was therefore out of step with both calendars for forty years. The common rule that you add 10 days [Mildred's comment: note that it's 10 days in the 17th century, 11 in the 18th, 12 in the 19th, and 13 in the 20th.] that to the Julian calendar to arrive at the Gregorian date is therefore not applicable in the case of Sweden during the period 1700–1740.
How have other authors handled this problem? Swedish sources and some English sources, such as Michael Roberts, use the Julian calendar. Most make no mention of it and one therefore doesn’t know which calendar they are using. Both Robert I. Frost and Ragnhild Hatton address this problem in their books. Frost tried to use the Gregorian calendar (New Style or NS) but admits that there probably are mistakes.
Hatton, in her note at the end of her preface, has this to say:
But in 1700 Sweden opted for a modified form of the Julian calendar in the hope of a gradual progress to the Gregorian one: they dropped leap-year of that year and thus remained ten days behind N.S. but at the same time one day ahead of O.S. [Old Style]. [end Hatton quote]
To make this confusing situation even more bewildering, in 1712 Karl XII decided that the system in place gave the Swedes the worst of both worlds and switched back to the Julian calendar.
While I have tried to use the Gregorian calendar wherever I knew which calendar was used by my source, there will no doubt be numerous inconsistencies since most of the sources did not specify which calendar they used. After spending a long time trying to figure out how to handle a problem that two eminent professors had so much difficulty with, I decided to change dates when I knew they needed to be changed but to leave them as found in whatever source I was using when I was not sure.
Swedish calendar
So we've talked about how the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar happened gradually in Europe, meaning different countries were on different calendars at the same time. Catholic countries switched first, than gradually Protestant, and eventually Eastern Orthodox (Russia not until the Russian Revolution). So different dates are given for different events depending on who's reporting them, and if your event took place around the beginning of the year, you'll have different years, and don't even get me started on having March 25 as the first day of your new year.
But I thought I was on top of this, confusing as it is, until I learned in November that Sweden decided to make things extra complicated! From Henrik Lunde's A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Decline of Sweden as a Military Superpower:
Sweden did not begin making the change to the Gregorian calendar until 1700 and, to make matters worse, it was done in a confusing and halting manner. The Swedish calendar was therefore out of step with both calendars for forty years. The common rule that you add 10 days [Mildred's comment: note that it's 10 days in the 17th century, 11 in the 18th, 12 in the 19th, and 13 in the 20th.] that to the Julian calendar to arrive at the Gregorian date is therefore not applicable in the case of Sweden during the period 1700–1740.
How have other authors handled this problem? Swedish sources and some English sources, such as Michael Roberts, use the Julian calendar. Most make no mention of it and one therefore doesn’t know which calendar they are using. Both Robert I. Frost and Ragnhild Hatton address this problem in their books. Frost tried to use the Gregorian calendar (New Style or NS) but admits that there probably are mistakes.
Hatton, in her note at the end of her preface, has this to say:
But in 1700 Sweden opted for a modified form of the Julian calendar in the hope of a gradual progress to the Gregorian one: they dropped leap-year of that year and thus remained ten days behind N.S. but at the same time one day ahead of O.S. [Old Style]. [end Hatton quote]
To make this confusing situation even more bewildering, in 1712 Karl XII decided that the system in place gave the Swedes the worst of both worlds and switched back to the Julian calendar.
While I have tried to use the Gregorian calendar wherever I knew which calendar was used by my source, there will no doubt be numerous inconsistencies since most of the sources did not specify which calendar they used. After spending a long time trying to figure out how to handle a problem that two eminent professors had so much difficulty with, I decided to change dates when I knew they needed to be changed but to leave them as found in whatever source I was using when I was not sure.