The Codex Gigas (The Devil's Bible)

The Codex Gigas contains four long texts as well as a complete Bible. The manuscript begins with the Old Testament, and it is followed by two historical works by Flavius Josephus who lived in the first century AD. These are The Antiquities and The Jewish War.

After Josephus is the most popular Encyclopaedia of the middle ages, by Isidore, who lived in the sixth century in Spain. This is followed by a collection of medical works, and these are followed by the New Testament.

The last of the long works is a Chronicle of Bohemia by Cosmas from Prague (ca 1045-1125). This is the first history of Bohemia and important work.

There are also some short texts in the manuscript. The first, before the picture of the Heavenly City, is a work on penitence. The second, after the Devil portrait, is on exorcising evil spirits. The last important short work is a Calendar, containing a list of saints and local Bohemian persons on the days on which they were commemorated. There is also one lost work, on leaves that have been cut out of the manuscript, the Rule of St Benedict, the essential guide to monastic life written in the sixth century.

The most important book of Christianity is the Bible. The other texts in the Codex Gigas were carefully chosen to accompany it because together they provided information about Jewish history (Josephus), universal knowledge (Isidore), medicine, and local history (Cosmas).

History

The origin of the Codex Gigas is unknown. A note written in the manuscript states that it was pawned in the monastery at Sedelec by its owners, the monks of Podlažice, in 1295 (f. 1v). It soon passed to the monastery of Břevnov near Prague. All of these monasteries were in Bohemia (now in the modern Czech Republic), and it is certain that the Codex Gigas was made somewhere in Bohemia, but not necessarily at Podlažice, a small and unimportant monastery .

In 1594 Rudolf II removed the Codex Gigas to his castle in Prague where it remained until it was taken during the Thirty Years War, with many other treasures, by the army of Sweden to Stockholm. It then entered the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden and put into the royal library in the castle at Stockholm. There it remained until 1877 when it entered the newly built National Library of Sweden in Stockholm (see History in Long Menu).

There is a legend concerning the making of the Codex Gigas that relates that it was the work of one scribe, and that the task was so enormous it was completed with the help of the Devil. The origin of the legend is unknown, and although it is clearly without any basis in truth, it shows how the enormous size of the manuscript so impressed those who saw it that was attributed a supernatural origin.

Description

The Codex Gigas has 310 parchment leaves, perhaps made from calfskins. The pages are now 890 mm tall by 490 mm wide, and this probably makes the Codex Gigas the biggest medieval European Latin manuscript to have survived. Each leaf was foliated at the centre of each recto in ink, probably in the seventeenth century, perhaps after the manuscript was brought to Sweden.

The texts were written on ruled guide lines, with an arrangement of two columns of 106 lines per column on each page. The manuscript was written and decorated (and this includes all of the initials, from the elaborate to the plain, as well as the full page illustrations showing the Heavenly City and the Devil Portrait) by one scribe-artist. No other work of his has been identified and where he was trained is unknown.

Script

The Codex Gigas was all written by one scribe in a late version of a script known as carolingian minuscule. (This is easy to read as the script is very like the letters we use today in books, magazines and newspapers.) The letters are between 3 and 2.5 millimetres tall and these are very small for such a big book. However, by writing small and having many lines on a page, the scribe could fit all the texts he wrote onto a manageable number of leaves.

It is very difficult to estimate how long it took the scribe to write the manuscript. The scribe could have written one column in the Codex Gigas, 106 lines, in a day. If the scribe worked for six hours a day and wrote six days a week this means that the manuscript could have taken about five years to complete. If the scribe was a monk he may only have been able to work for about three hours a day, and this means that the manuscript could have taken ten years to write. As the scribe may also have ruled the lines to guide the writing before he began to write (it probably took several hours to rule one leaf), this extends the period it took to complete the manuscript. The scribe also decorated the manuscript, so this all means that the manuscript probably took at least twenty years to finish, and could even have taken thirty.

Binding

The manuscript is enclosed by thick wooden boards covered with tawed (white) skin. The covers are elaborately decorated in blind, one of the most prominent tools being that of a crown, but none of the tools have been found elsewhere. Both covers also have pierced metal furniture, four corner pieces, each containing two griffins, and one centre piece, each with a circular raised part (boss) on which the book would rest when closed. The back cover has two additional pieces, each with a pierced raised element, probably to allow the Codex Gigas to be chained or attached in some way to a piece of library furniture. The date of this metal furniture is uncertain, but some of it probably dates from before the present binding.

The leaves of the manuscript were repaired with parchment and the present binding made in 1819 by a Stockholm binder named Samuel Sandman. The binder was paid a total of 78 riksdaler for his materials and work. (In 1820 a cow could cost 45 riksdaler, and this gives some idea of the value of Sandman’s work.) However, the wooden boards were probably reused from the first binding, made soon after the manuscript had been completed, in the early thirteenth century.

Decoration

The decoration in Codex Gigas comprises two full-page pictures, two marginal pictures and fifty-seven decorated initials.

Two full-page pictures represent the Heavenly City (f. 289v) and the portrait of the Devil on the opposite page (f. 290r). These two pages are deliberately planned to show a contrast between a symbol of hope and salvation and a symbol of evil and darkness.

Two marginal pictures can be found to the Antiquities by Josephus Flavius. One is to the prologue and represents the portrait of the author (f. 118r). The second consists of two roundels close to the opening of the Antiquitates. This work starts by quoting the beginning of the book of Genesis In principio (In the beginning), but the first letter I is missing. The picture depicts the Heaven and the Earth and illustrates the start of the Creation story. These are the only literal illustrations in the Codex Gigas.

Initials

The decorated initials are at the beginning of the main texts and their principal divisions.
The beginnings of the Biblical books have elaborately decorated initials. They are fully coloured and decorated with the spirals ended with the stylised leaves and flowers. The decoration only occasionally includes birds or animals.
Six of the initials are full-page initials. Two are in the Old Testament at the beginning of the Book of Joshua (f. 24r) and Kings (f. 65r), and four are in the New Testament opening the Gospels. The initials to St Matthew (f. 254r) and St Mark (f. 258v) have gold grounds. They are the only initials where the gold was used.

The beginning of the Pentateuch was certainly decorated with a full-page initial, but this leaf is now missing.

There is one other elaborately decorated initial and that is for Book 1 of the Chronicle by Cosmas of Prague.

The next most elaborate initials are of two kinds. The first are arabesque initials, with letters in blue and foliate decoration in red. The second are pen flourished initials, with letters in one colour and pen-made decoration. They are in Etymologies (f. 201r) and in the Calendar (306v). There are a few other arabesque and pen flourished initials used to mark the beginning of some prologues and passages within books of the Bible (f. 23v).

The Codex Gigas was decorated by one and the same person who was also the scribe of the manuscript.

http://www.kb.se/codex-gigas/eng/