The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Monday, November 20, 2023 ~
I want to be careful about what I am about to write. I have been careful with this material for a long time. What follows is not a claim. It is a convergence that I have been watching accumulate for the better part of a decade, and which I can no longer continue to write around.
~ 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, October 17, 2022 ~
Among the Strahov Monastery Library’s holdings of Jesuit Bohemian Province correspondence is a mission report dated 1694, authored by a Father Václav Kříž and covering his circuit through villages in the central Bohemian highlands. The report is administrative in character — baptisms performed, confessions heard, resistant households noted for follow-up — and unremarkable except for a single marginal annotation in a different hand, added at an unknown date after the original was filed.
~ 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.