Codex Gigas, Stockholm's 'Devil's Bible'

Lifting the Codex Gigas takes at least two people: the volume measures about ninety-two centimetres in height and fifty in width, and weighs more than seventy kilograms. It is the largest medieval manuscript to have come down to us and is kept at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm. Its nickname, the 'Devil's Bible', comes from a single page, but its real history is one of monasteries, wars and fires.

An encyclopedia in a single volume

The codex was written at the beginning of the thirteenth century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, in Bohemia, in today's Czech Republic. Its contents go well beyond the Latin Vulgate Bible, which takes up most of it. It includes the Jewish Antiquities and the Jewish War of Flavius Josephus, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, the Chronicle of the Bohemians by Cosmas of Prague, medical treatises, a calendar with a necrology and a number of formulas of exorcism and conjuration.

The handwriting is remarkably uniform from start to finish, so much so that scholars believe it was the work of a single scribe. Estimates of the time required speak of many years of work, perhaps around twenty. The necrology contains the name of a Hermannus inclusus, Herman the Recluse, whom some identify as the scribe of the codex, but the attribution remains a hypothesis.

The devil and the heavenly city

On folio 290 recto the codex shows a large figure of the devil, crouching, with horns and claws, drawn alone in the middle of the page. On the facing page appears the heavenly Jerusalem, a turreted city with no inhabitants. The pairing, clearly deliberate, contrasts the kingdom of God with that of evil, and stands close to the formulas against demons.

The legend grew out of this image. According to the story handed down, a monk sentenced to be walled up alive promised to write in a single night a book that would bring glory to the monastery; at midnight, in despair, he called upon the devil, who finished the work in exchange for his soul. The tale is a late legend without any documentary basis, but it has followed the codex for centuries.

From Prague to Stockholm

The manuscript passed through several Bohemian monasteries and in 1594 entered the collections of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In 1648, in the last months of the Thirty Years' War, the Swedish army occupied part of the city and carried it off to Stockholm as booty. In 1697 a fire destroyed the royal castle: the codex survived, according to a contemporary account, because it was thrown out of a window.

Some leaves are missing, perhaps removed long ago, and their contents are not known for certain. In 2007 the codex returned to Prague for a few months for an exhibition organised by the National Library of the Czech Republic: it was its first return to Bohemia in more than three and a half centuries. The exhibition drew large crowds and confirmed how strongly the codex is still felt to be part of Bohemia's cultural heritage.

The Codex Gigas is now digitised and open to anyone. More than a book of magic, it is a portrait of what a medieval monastery thought worth preserving: Scripture, history, medicine and, beside all this, the fear of the devil. The legend of the devil's pact says a great deal about the imagination of those who looked at it, and little about its origin.