Adoption in various countries
The derivation of the term style for a type of calendar seems to have originated sometime soon after the 6th century as a result of developments in calendar computation in the previous 200 years. In 463 ce Victorius (or Victorinus) of Aquitaine, who had been appointed by Pope Hilarius to undertake calendar revision, devised the Great Paschal (i.e., Passover) period, sometimes later referred to as the Victorian period. It was a combination of the solar cycle of 28 years and the Metonic 19-year cycle, bringing the Full Moon back to the same day of the month, and amounted to 28 × 19, or 532 years. In the 6th century this period was used by Dionysius Exiguus (Denis the Little) in computing the date of Easter, because it gave the day of the week for any day in any year, and so it also became known as the Dionysian period. Dionysius took the year now called 532 ce as the first year of a new Great Paschal period and the year now designated 1 bce as the beginning of the previous cycle. In the 6th century it was the general belief that this was the year of Christ’s birth, and because of this Dionysius introduced the concept of numbering years consecutively through the Christian era. The method was adopted by some scholars but seems only to have become widely used after its popularization by the Venerable Bede of Jarrow (673?–735), whose reputation for scholarship was very high in Western Christendom in the 8th century. This system of bce/ce numbering threw into relief the different practices, or styles, of reckoning the beginning of the year then in use. When the Gregorian calendar firmly established January 1 as the beginning of its year, it was widely referred to as the New Style calendar, with the Julian the Old Style calendar. In Britain, under the Julian calendar, the year had first begun on December 25 and then, from the 14th century onward, on March 25.
Because of the division of the Eastern and Western Christian churches and of Protestants and Roman Catholics, the obvious advantages of the Gregorian calendar were not accepted everywhere, and in some places adoption was extremely slow. In France, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain, the New Style calendar was adopted in 1582, and it was in use by most of the German Roman Catholic states as well as by Belgium and part of the Netherlands by 1584. Switzerland’s change was gradual, on the other hand, beginning in 1583 and being completed only in 1812. Hungary adopted the New Style in 1587, and then there was a pause of more than a century before the first Protestant countries made the transition from the Old Style calendar. In 1699–1700, Denmark and the Dutch and German Protestant states embraced the New Style, although the Germans declined to adopt the rules laid down for determining Easter. The Germans preferred to rely instead on astronomical tables and specified the use of the Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627; “Rudolphine Tables”), based on the 16th-century observations of Tycho Brahe. They acceded to the Gregorian calendar rules for Easter only in 1776. Britain adopted the New Style in 1752 and Sweden in 1753, although the Swedes, because they had in 1740 followed the German Protestants in using their astronomical methods for determining Easter, declined to adopt the Gregorian calendar rules until 1844. Japan adopted the New Style in 1873; Egypt adopted it in 1875; and between 1912 and 1917 it was accepted by Albania, Bulgaria, China, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey. The now-defunct Soviet Union adopted the New Style in 1918, and Greece in 1923.
In Britain and the British dominions, the change was made when the difference between the New and Old Style calendars amounted to 11 days: the lag was covered by naming the day after September 2, 1752, as September 14, 1752. There was widespread misunderstanding among the public, however, even though legislation authorizing the change had been framed to avoid injustice and financial hardship. The Alaskan territory retained the Old Style calendar until 1867, when it was transferred from Russia to the United States.