~ Wednesday, March 15, 2023 ~
Seven parchment leaves. Thirty-eight prayer formulas. The oldest surviving codex written in Glagolitic script. Discovered in 1874 at the library of the Kiev Theological Academy, acquired from Jerusalem sometime in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Before Jerusalem: nothing documented. Before nothing: Great Moravia, perhaps 900 AD, a scriptorium that no longer exists in a political entity that was destroyed before anyone thought to record where its books went.
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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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~ 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.
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~ Saturday, May 15, 2021 ~
The popular account of medieval cathedral labyrinths runs as follows. After Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, pilgrimage to the Holy Land became impossible or dangerous for most European Christians. The Church responded by constructing symbolic substitutes — labyrinths in cathedral naves, called chemins de Jérusalem, roads to Jerusalem. Penitents walked them, sometimes on their knees, as a proxy for the actual journey. The centre represented the Holy City. The path represented the long road to get there.
This account is coherent. It has the further advantage of being emotionally satisfying in a way that makes it easy to repeat. It has one problem: it is not documented.
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