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The Codex Gigas, or 'Giant Book', is the largest surviving medieval manuscript: made in Bohemia in the early 1200s, it stands about 92 centimetres tall, has 310 parchment leaves and weighs some 75 kilograms. The handwriting shows that a single scribe wrote it, over more than 20 years.

Bohemia, early 13th century

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The story behind the card

It was probably made at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, in today's Czech Republic, and brings together a complete Latin Bible, histories, medical texts and an encyclopedia in one volume. Legend calls it the Devil's Bible: a monk facing punishment was said to have promised to write it in a single night and to have sold his soul to the Devil for help. The story is folklore, but the book does contain a famous full-page picture of the Devil. In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, Swedish troops seized it in Prague as war booty. It has been in Stockholm since 1649 and is kept today at the National Library of Sweden.

Türkçe oku
“Dev Kitap” anlamına gelen Codex Gigas, günümüze ulaşan en büyük Orta Çağ el yazmasıdır. 1200'lerin başında Bohemya'da yapılan kitap yaklaşık 92 santimetre boyunda, 310 parşömen yapraktan oluşuyor ve 75 kilograma yakın. El yazısı, kitabın tamamını tek bir kâtibin 20 yılı aşkın sürede yazdığını gösteriyor.
Bohemya, 13. yüzyıl başı

Kitap büyük olasılıkla bugünkü Çekya'da bulunan Podlažice Benedikten Manastırı'nda yazıldı. Tek bir ciltte eksiksiz bir Latince Kutsal Kitap'ı, tarih kitaplarını, tıp metinlerini ve bir ansiklopediyi bir araya getirir. Efsaneye göre adı Şeytan'ın İncili'dir: Cezaya çarptırılan bir keşişin kitabı tek gecede yazmaya söz verdiği ve yardım karşılığında ruhunu Şeytan'a sattığı anlatılır. Bu bir halk efsanesidir, ama kitapta gerçekten de Şeytan'ı tam sayfa gösteren ünlü bir resim vardır. İsveç askerleri 1648'de, Otuz Yıl Savaşları'nın sonunda kitabı Prag'dan savaş ganimeti olarak aldı. Kitap 1649'dan beri Stockholm'de, bugün İsveç Ulusal Kütüphanesi'nde saklanıyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Codex Gigas
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On 12 March 1951, two unrelated comic characters called Dennis the Menace made their debut: an American newspaper cartoon launched in 16 papers, and a British strip went on sale in The Beano. Neither side knew of the other.

Hank Ketcham, a cartoonist in Carmel, California, took the idea from his four-year-old son, Dennis: in October 1950 the boy refused his nap and wrecked his room, and his exasperated mother called him a menace. Ketcham's Dennis is a blond, well-meaning boy whose curiosity causes chaos. In Dundee, Scotland, Beano editor George Moonie took the name from a music-hall song, 'I'm Dennis the Menace from Venice', and artist David Law drew a scowling boy in a striped jumper for issue 452. To avoid confusion, the American strip was retitled simply 'Dennis' for British readers, while the British boy often appears abroad as 'Dennis and Gnasher'. Both are still published.

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

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Much of ancient Greek philosophy and science reached us through Byzantine scribes, who kept copying the old texts by hand in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Before and after the city fell in 1453, Greek scholars carried many of these manuscripts to Italy.

Parchment and papyrus decay, so an ancient text survived only if someone kept making fresh copies. In the 9th and 10th centuries Byzantine scribes adopted a smaller, joined-up handwriting called minuscule and recopied the classics in it. Few of the older manuscripts were kept, so for many ancient authors the oldest surviving copy dates from this period. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, summarised 279 books he had read; almost half are now lost, so for many of them his notes are our main record. His pupil Arethas, later archbishop of Caesarea, today's Kayseri, had manuscripts copied that preserve works by Plato and Marcus Aurelius; his Plato is now in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The 10th-century Suda, an encyclopaedia of some 30,000 entries, also quotes many lost sources. This revival of learning is known as the Macedonian Renaissance, after the ruling dynasty.

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Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

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The Protestant Reformation spread fast partly thanks to printing. From 1517 onwards Martin Luther's writings came off the presses as short, cheap pamphlets, many of them in German rather than Latin; in the first third of the 16th century, about one in five works printed in Germany was his.

The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

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