Created in the early 13th century at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, Bohemia, now held by the National Library of Sweden after being taken as war loot in 1648. Palaeographic analysis attributes the entire book to a single scribe over an estimated 20-plus years of work, not one night. The legend of the monk's pact with the devil to finish in a night appears centuries later; the devil portrait is real and unique.
The legend says a monk sentenced to be walled alive promised to write a book containing all human knowledge in one night, and sold his soul to complete it, painting the devil in gratitude. The missing pages around the portrait, cut out at some point, keep the story fed.
The interesting claim: the devil faces a depiction of the heavenly city across the book's central spread, a deliberate theology of choice placed at the codex's hinge. The scribe, possibly a monk doing penance by labor, built an entire world between two images and left no name. The pact story is the culture's refusal to credit twenty years of patience.
What kind of monk signs his work with the devil's face, and what was he really confessing?