~ Monday, July 11, 2022 ~
The phrase “Bohemian hypothesis,” as applied to Beinecke MS 408, means several different things in different contexts, and the differences matter. In most of the writing I have read, it refers loosely to the manuscript’s Prague history — the Rudolf II claim, the Hořčický signature, Baresch and Marci. This is a provenance claim. In a smaller body of writing, it refers to a theory that the manuscript was produced in Bohemia. This is an origin claim. The two are not the same, and conflating them has produced a great deal of confusion.
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~ Saturday, May 14, 2022 ~
Křemešník rises to 769 metres above the Pelhřimov valley and carries mixed forest to its summit. It is the highest point in its subregion of the Vysočina highlands. The hill has a spring, a founding legend involving a flooded mine shaft, and a Baroque pilgrimage church that was built on the site of a Gothic chapel that was built on something older, as these things usually are.
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~ Monday, March 21, 2022 ~
The claim that Rudolf II purchased Beinecke MS 408 for 600 gold ducats rests on a single letter written in 1666, reporting what a now-dead man had told the letter’s author at some point before 1644, about a purchase made sometime before 1612. Archivists have a term for this class of evidence. It is called hearsay.
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~ Saturday, March 19, 2022 ~
The Archives Départementales d’Eure-et-Loir hold the surviving records of the chapter of Notre-Dame de Chartres. I was there in late autumn, working through material in fonds 3G — the chapter records — related to the schedule of 14th-century Marian feast days. I was not looking for anything about the labyrinth.
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~ Tuesday, January 11, 2022 ~
The standard narrative places the Christianization of Moravia and Bohemia at 863 CE, with the arrival of the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius at the invitation of Prince Rastislav. This is accurate in outline. But Rastislav’s letter to Constantinople does not say what the standard narrative implies. It says his people had already rejected paganism. Cyril and Methodius arrived not at the beginning of Christianity in this region but well into its middle.
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