Codex Gigas: The Devil's Bible and the Monk Who Supposedly Sold His Soul

Behind the glass sits a book you could not lift. It is nearly a meter tall, thick as a sea chest, bound in wood and leather, and open to the one page everybody has come to see: a full-length portrait of the devil, crouched and grinning, painted eight centuries ago by a man of God. The librarians in Stockholm will tell you its nickname before its shelf number. Everyone does.

The Codex Gigas, Latin for "giant book," is the largest surviving medieval manuscript in the world, produced in the early thirteenth century at the Benedictine monastery of Podlazice in Bohemia, in today's Czech Republic. It weighs roughly as much as an adult wolfhound and required the skins of well over a hundred animals. Inside is a complete Latin Bible, but also Josephus' histories, Isidore of Seville's encyclopedia, medical texts, a chronicle of Bohemia, a calendar, and, notably, formulas for exorcism and conjurations against evil, bound within pages of the same holy book. Medieval readers saw no contradiction; later readers saw a story.

The legend of Herman the Recluse

The folklore, and it is folklore, goes like this. A monk, sometimes named Herman the Recluse, broke his vows so gravely that he was sentenced to be walled up alive. He bargained: spare me, and I will write, in a single night, a book containing all human knowledge to glorify the monastery forever. Near midnight, with the task hopeless, he prayed not upward but downward, and the devil finished the manuscript in exchange for his soul. The monk added the devil's portrait as payment acknowledged, or as a warning, depending on who is telling it. The legend is first attested centuries after the book was made, and it exists because the book itself seems to demand an impossible explanation.

The sober findings are, in their way, stranger. Analysis of the script shows the entire manuscript, all of it, was written by a single scribe, in a hand so uniform that experts estimate the labor at five years of continuous writing, and more plausibly twenty or thirty once ruling, rubrication and illumination are counted. One human being appears to have spent most of his adult life alone with this object. An inscription naming "Hermanus monachus inclusus" suggests the scribe may indeed have been a voluntary recluse, walled into a cell by his own devotion, which is likely the seed the legend grew from.

The devil on folio two ninety

The famous portrait faces a full-page image of the Heavenly City, an arrangement scholars read as a deliberate pairing: the two destinations, choose. The devil is alone, boxed in an empty frame, with claws, a forked red tongue and an ermine loincloth, ermine being a royal fabric, a detail that reads as satire. Opposite pages of the manuscript around this spread are darkened, which lore attributes to infernal presence and conservators attribute to centuries of visitors turning to exactly this opening and exposing it to light.

The book's later biography did nothing to calm anyone. It passed through pawn, monastery and imperial collection, was looted by the Swedish army from Prague in 1648 in the last year of the Thirty Years' War, and survived the 1697 fire at the royal castle in Stockholm reportedly because someone threw it out of a window, injuring, in some tellings, a bystander below. It resides today in the National Library of Sweden, which lent it back to Prague for an exhibition in 2007, under guard appropriate to a national treasure with a diabolical press agent.

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