The Codex Gigas

The Codex Gigas is the largest surviving medieval manuscript in the world. It stands nearly a metre tall, its wooden boards bound in leather and once ornamented with metal, and it is heavy enough that two people are needed to lift it. Some three hundred and ten leaves of vellum survive, prepared from the skins of well over a hundred animals. To turn its pages is to handle a book built on a scale meant to overawe.

Its contents are a whole library pressed between two covers: the complete Latin Vulgate Bible, the histories of Flavius Josephus, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, a book of medicine, a chronicle of Bohemia, and formulas of exorcism. But the volume owes its darker name to a single full-page illustration. There, alone on the leaf, crouches a large coloured portrait of the Devil, horned and clawed and forked of tongue, which has given the book its enduring nickname: the Devil’s Bible.

Legend supplied a fittingly infernal origin. A monk, it was said, had broken his vows and been condemned to be walled up alive. To save himself he promised to write in a single night a book containing all human knowledge; realising the task was impossible, he prayed instead to the Devil, who finished the work in exchange for his soul, and the grateful monk added the fiend’s likeness in tribute.

The truth is stranger for being human. The uniformity of the script from first page to last points to a single scribe labouring not for a night but across decades, perhaps an entire working life, in the quiet of a Bohemian monastery early in the thirteenth century. Whatever devil drove him, it was the ordinary one of a task begun and doggedly finished.

Provenance: the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, Bohemia, early thirteenth century; taken as spoils of war in 1648 and now held at the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm.