New Delhi: How massive can books be? The Codex Gigas, the world’s largest extant medieval illuminated manuscript possibly answers this question. The length of a page of the book is an astounding 36 inches. While the Romanesque monastic book production had massive illuminated bibles, even then, the page size of the Codex Gigas was exceptional. Also called the Devil’s Bible due to the full-page portrait of Satan, it has interesting legends surrounding its creation.
When was the book written?
According to reports, Herman the Recluse wrote the Codex Gigas in the Benedictine monastery of the Czech Republic’s Podlažice. In the 15th century, the Hussite Revolution destroyed the monastery but the place is still recognisable. The last record in the book was entered in 1222 and the Benedictines pawned it shortly afterwards to the Sedlec Monastery’s Cistercian monks. It remained there for 70 years and later it was reclaimed by the Benedictine monastery in Břevnov around the end of the 13th century. It was in the library of a monastery in Broumov since 1477. In 1594, it was added to the collection of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague.
The Swedish Army took it as a war collection after the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and it has been kept in the Swedish Royal Library in Stockholm since 1649. While a fire in 1697 destroyed much of the Royal Library, the Codex Gigas was saved by being thrown out of a window and in that process, it even injured a bystander!
The legend behind its creation
There is a famous legend of the Middle Ages behind the creation of the Codex Gigas. It is said that it was written by a single scribe. The scribe, also a monk, broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive. To save his life, he promised to create a book overnight to glorify the monastery forever.
The monk could not finish the book on time and prayed to Lucifer for help out of desperation. The Devil completed the work and the monk added Lucifer’s picture as a tribute. In later years, it has been estimated that to reproduce only the book’s calligraphy sans the illustrations would need someone to write non-stop for 20 years. The manuscript was written in Latin and contains the complete Vulgate Bible and other popular works between the Old and New Testaments.
There is a famous legend of the Middle Ages behind the creation of the Codex Gigas. It is said that it was written by a single scribe who was also a monk and broke his monastic vows. knowledge Knowledge News, Photos and Videos on General Knowledge
