The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Monday, August 14, 2023 ~
Pavel Šimánek stopped answering email in March. I assumed he was travelling, or had changed address, or was simply doing the thing that independent researchers sometimes do when they are deep in something: ignoring everything that is not the work. In June a mutual acquaintance forwarded a notebook. I have been sitting on it since then. I am publishing this because I think someone else should know the notebook exists. I am not sure what it means.
~ 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.
~ 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.
~ 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.
~ 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.