~ 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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~ 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.
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~ 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.
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~ 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.
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~ 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.
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