The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Monday, September 13, 2021 ~
Beinecke MS 408 has attracted more speculative commentary per page than almost any other document in the Western manuscript tradition. The commentary, taken as a whole, is not particularly useful. What the manuscript has attracted rather less of is careful attention to what its documentary record actually establishes — and what it does not. That is the subject of this and several subsequent articles.
~ Monday, July 19, 2021 ~
Sometime in the seventeenth century, someone wrote a short note on a piece of vellum, folded it once, and placed it with a collection of documents it did not belong to. The note has been in the Moravian Land Archive in Brno since at least the nineteenth century. Nobody has identified who wrote it, where, or why.
~ Monday, June 14, 2021 ~
A great deal of what gets called the Amber Road is simply geography. The corridor that runs from the Baltic coast to the Danube basin through the Moravian Gate is not a road in any meaningful sense. It is a series of terrain features — river valleys, a gap between mountain ranges, a gradual watershed — that make certain directions of travel easier than others. Amber moved through it. So did everything else.
~ Saturday, May 15, 2021 ~
The popular account of medieval cathedral labyrinths runs as follows. After Jerusalem fell to Saladin in 1187, pilgrimage to the Holy Land became impossible or dangerous for most European Christians. The Church responded by constructing symbolic substitutes — labyrinths in cathedral naves, called chemins de Jérusalem, roads to Jerusalem. Penitents walked them, sometimes on their knees, as a proxy for the actual journey. The centre represented the Holy City. The path represented the long road to get there.
This account is coherent. It has the further advantage of being emotionally satisfying in a way that makes it easy to repeat. It has one problem: it is not documented.
~ Wednesday, April 7, 2021 ~
When Judas Iscariot left the apostolic circle — whether at the moment of the betrayal or earlier in the narrative, depending on which gospel’s chronology one follows — there was a period, however brief, during which the circle stood at eleven. The urgency with which Acts moved to correct this tells us, without ambiguity, why the number twelve was never incidental.