The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Monday, November 8, 2021 ~
Beinecke MS 408 currently contains approximately 240 pages. The original manuscript, by quire analysis, contained approximately 272 — leaving roughly 32 pages unaccounted for. Some are gone by deterioration. Some were cut. Two entire quires have no trace at all. This article is about what is absent.
~ Tuesday, October 5, 2021 ~
The apostolic tradition did not distribute knowledge evenly. It distributed responsibility. This distinction appears in apocryphal custodian literature with a consistency that institutional scholarship has preferred not to examine, but that the texts themselves do not permit to be set aside.
~ Saturday, October 9, 2021 ~
The Chartres labyrinth was measured and built using the Roman foot — 294.45 millimetres — as its basic unit. This is the same unit used throughout the rest of the cathedral. The path length is 888 Roman feet. The diameter corresponds, in whole units, to the building’s master geometric plan. These are not decorative choices. They are the marks left by a measurement system, and they connect the labyrinth to the structure around it in ways that are precise enough to verify.
~ Monday, September 13, 2021 ~
Beinecke MS 408 has attracted more speculative commentary per page than almost any other document in the Western manuscript tradition. The commentary, taken as a whole, is not particularly useful. What the manuscript has attracted rather less of is careful attention to what its documentary record actually establishes — and what it does not. That is the subject of this and several subsequent articles.
~ Monday, July 19, 2021 ~
Sometime in the seventeenth century, someone wrote a short note on a piece of vellum, folded it once, and placed it with a collection of documents it did not belong to. The note has been in the Moravian Land Archive in Brno since at least the nineteenth century. Nobody has identified who wrote it, where, or why.