Sacred Calendars; Rogationtide with Alison Milbank

Rogationtide is the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday: it was, and to some extent still is, a time when God’s blessing was asked upon the springtime and the work in the fields. At the same time it was a festival of the community when the boundaries of each person’s fields were publicly acknowledged and the community sought to reconcile the differences between neighbours. It still has a formal place in Anglican liturgy – and has a new prominence in Common Worship – and, so Alison Milbank argues, has a message that is as valuable today as when we lived in close proximity to land, agriculture, and food production.