The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ 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.
~ 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.
~ Friday, October 15, 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.