For more details on calendar pages or the Hours of Joanna of Castile, please see the entry for January 2012

Calendar pages for August, from the Hours of Joanna of Castile, Netherlands (Bruges), between 1496 and 1506, Additional 18852, ff. 8v-9

The important work of the wheat harvest continues in the August calendar pages; there seems no place for leisurely springtime entertainments (such as drinking in a garden or flirting on horseback) in these two scenes of demanding labour.  Three men, stripped to the bare essentials of clothing, are threshing wheat on the left, inside a barn with a broken roof.  On the right, a female figure - for Virgo, the virgin - overlooks a group loading the wheat grains into sacks, which appear very heavy indeed.