The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ 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.
~ 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.
~ 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.