Definition
A calendrical term in ecclesiastical law designating the third Sunday before Quadragesima Sunday in Lent, falling approximately seventy days before Easter. Because Easter is a moveable feast, Septuagesima has no fixed calendar date and shifts from year to year. The name derives from the Latin for "seventieth," reflecting its approximate (though not precise) distance from Easter.
In legal usage, Septuagesima appears as a temporal reference point in historical documents, contracts, writs, and ecclesiastical instruments that reckon dates by the church calendar rather than by fixed civil calendar dates. A document dated "on Septuagesima Sunday" or specifying a deadline by reference to Septuagesima requires calculation backward from Easter for that year to resolve.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A Sunday in the Christian calendar nine weeks before Easter Sunday.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The third Sunday before Lent; so called because it is about seventy days before Easter.
The common and legal definitions are largely aligned in substance. The legal significance lies not in a difference of meaning but in a difference of context: in historical legal instruments, Septuagesima functions as a dating mechanism with binding legal consequences, not merely a liturgical observance. Understanding the term in a legal source requires knowing how to calculate the date it designates, not just what the term means.
Why It Matters in Research
Septuagesima is one of several moveable ecclesiastical feast days used in pre-modern and early modern legal drafting to establish dates for payments, court appearances, lease terms, and other legally operative events. This practice was common in English ecclesiastical law, ecclesiastical court records, and in civil documents drafted in jurisdictions with strong church influence.
Researchers working with medieval and early modern English legal documents — wills, leases, ecclesiastical court proceedings, tithe records, and church court writs — will encounter Septuagesima and its related Sundays (Sexagesima, Quinquagesima) as date anchors. Resolving these dates requires access to a perpetual ecclesiastical calendar or Easter table for the relevant year. Misreading or ignoring the moveable nature of the date is the primary research trap: the same documentary phrase designates different calendar dates in different years, and a researcher who assumes a fixed date will miscalculate deadlines and sequences of events.
Because Septuagesima is specific to the pre-Lenten cycle, it also signals ecclesiastical context. A legal document referencing this Sunday is likely connected to church courts, clerical matters, or parties operating within ecclesiastical institutional life. Its appearance in a secular civil document would be unusual enough to warrant closer scrutiny of the document's origins.
No significant doctrinal evolution attaches to the term itself. Its relevance is purely as a temporal reference anchor.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree completely on the substantive definition: the third Sunday before Quadragesima Sunday, approximately seventy days before Easter. Black's first and second editions are identical in substance, with the second edition adding the label "in ecclesiastical law" to make explicit what the first edition leaves implicit. Rapalje & Lawrence reproduce the same definition and helpfully include it within a cluster of Latin-derived ecclesiastical and Roman law terms, suggesting its primary utility as a reference tool for readers encountering the term in historical documents.
None of the historical dictionaries explain how to calculate the date from Easter, nor do they address the document-dating context in any practical depth. Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary are consistent with each other and with the legal dictionaries, which is expected given that the term carries the same meaning in ecclesiastical and general usage — the legal layer adds context of use rather than a distinct definition.
The brief Rapalje & Lawrence entry usefully situates Septuagesima alongside Septum (an enclosure) and Septunx (a Roman law division of the as), reflecting the dictionary's role as a glossary of foreign and archaic legal terms encountered in source documents rather than a doctrinal treatise.
Jurisdictional Note
Septuagesima as a legal reference point appears primarily in English ecclesiastical law sources and in jurisdictions historically subject to canon law influence. It is essentially absent from American legal materials as an operative term, appearing only in historical documents of colonial or ecclesiastical provenance.