Paul Lacroix was a 19th-century French librarian, historian, and novelist, best known for his encyclopedic works on the life of the Middle Ages. In his Manners, Customs and Dress During the Middle Ages, he provides wonderful glimpses of customs long dead. Today we will look at what he had to say about attitudes to food and fasting therefrom. As we are now in the midst of the Lenten season, it is proper to notice the seriousness with which our ancestors regarded the duties of abstinence.
A monk of the Abbey of Cluny once went on a visit to his relations. On arriving he asked for food; but as it was a fast day he was told there was nothing in the house but fish. Perceiving some chickens in the yard, he took a stick and killed one, and brought it to his relations, saying, “This is the fish which I shall eat to-day.” “Eh, but, my son, they said, “have you dispensation from fasting on a Friday?” “No,” he answered; “but poultry is not flesh; fish and fowls were created at the same time; they have a common origin, as the hymn which I sing in the service teaches me.”
This simple legend belongs to the tenth century; and notwithstanding that the opinion of this Benedictine monk may appear strange nowadays, yet it must be acknowledged that he was only conforming himself to the opinions laid down by certain theologians. In 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle decided that such delicate nourishment could scarcely be called mortification as understood by the teaching of the Church. In consequence of this an order was issued forbidding the monks to eat poultry, except during four days at Easter and four at Christmas. But this prohibition in no way changed the established custom of certain parts of Christendom, and the faithful persisted in believing that poultry and fish were identical in the eyes of the Church, and accordingly continued to eat them indiscriminately. We also see, in the middle of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas, who was considered an authority in questions of dogma and of faith, ranking poultry amongst species of aquatic origin.
An edict of Henry II, 1549, forbade the sale of meat in Lent to persons who should not be furnished with a doctor’s certificate. Charles IX forbade the sale of meat to the Huguenots; and it was ordered that the privilege of selling meat during the time of abstinence should belong exclusively to the hospitals. Orders were given to those who retailed meat to take the address of every purchaser, although he had presented a medical certificate, so that the necessity for his eating meat might be verified. Subsequently, the medical certificate required to be endorsed by the priest, specifying what quantity of meat was required.
“Caliph” means “successor”, successor to the Arab prophet Muhammed and, thus, the supreme voice of Sunni Islam. Throughout history a number of dynasties have claimed the caliphate and from the early 1500s, the Ottoman emperors in Constantinople were considered to be the rightful holders of the title. In 1914 as World War I began, Mehmed V in his role as Caliph allied his realm with Germany and Austria and declared a jihad against the British and French. The result was a disaster; the Ottomans lost their holdings in the Middle East and North Africa and the empire was reduced to an Anatolian rump. Worse was to come. A movement led by Kemal Pasha (later known as Ataturk) deposed the Ottomans – Mehmed VI was the last on the throne – and proclaimed a secular republic in 1922. The title of caliph, now severed from the imperial post, fell to a cousin of Mehmed, Abdulmejid.
For a time, Kemal tolerated the existence of a Caliph at least as a figurehead. When Abdulmejid requested increased state funding for his office, Kemal snapped, “Your office, the Khalifate, is no more than an historic relic. It has no justification for existence. It is a piece of impertinence that you should dare write to any of my secretaries!” When Indian supporters of the Khilafat Movement, a pan-Islamic group, tried to agitate inside Turkey, Kemal decided to abolish the caliphate altogether on this date in 1924. Abdulmejid was sent into exile and he spent his last days painting (he was a very accomplished artist). He died in Paris in 1944 as the city was being liberated from German occupation and was buried in Medina.
Since then the dream of a restored caliphate has been kept alive. The leader of ISIS , Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed himself Caliph in 2013 but his reign was cut short by his suicide under attack by US special forces in 2019. His successor Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurash died under similar circumstances in 2022. At this moment there is no indication that the title has been passed on.
P.G. Wodehouse said, “It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” One such irate Hibernian, Roderick MacLean, was annoyed with English folk and Queen Victoria in particular and entered the annals of infamy with a bungled regicide.
Roderick MacLean was born in 1854 and seems to have fallen into a what we could today a state of paranoia schizophrenia, convinced that he was beset with enemies and secret watchers. He believed that he spoke personally with God who had assured him that he would ascend the British throne someday. God also gave him the secret number four and the colour blue as his lucky signs. After stating that he was intent on killing someone — anyone — his sister had him committed to a lunatic asylum. On his release he acquired a pistol and made his way to Windsor.
On March 2, 1882, as Queen Victoria made her way from the train to her coach, MacLean raised a gun and fired on her. The shot missed and he was set upon by the crowd. He was put on trial for high treason but a jury took only 5 minutes to pronounce him not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent the rest of his days in Broadmoor Prison, dying in 1912.
This was the last of 8 assassination attempts made upon Queen Victoria. They may well have led to an increased popularity with Britons. The monarch told her daughter that she was moved by the “enthusiasm, loyalty, sympathy and affection” shown by her subjects, and added: “It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”
The great shame of the Christian Church after its legalization in the 4th century and its subsequent conversion of the Roman Empire was its tendency to acrimony and schism in debates about the nature of Christ. Some of these struggles were necessary: the notion of Arius that Christ was a subordinate creation of God and the assertions of the Trinitarians that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were coequal and coeternal could not live together harmoniously in the same Church. (The fact that the barbarian conquerors were usually Arian Christians made this an even more vexed question.)
Bu the later quarrels over the balance of human and divine natures in Christ and whether Christ had a single energy or a single will led to a blizzard of contending schools — Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Eutychians, Monophysites, Miaphysites, Mononergists, Monotheletists, not to mention Monarchianists, Modalists of various stripes, Sabellians, and Adoptionists – that were not always edifying.
Enter then Pope Felix II (or III if you count an earlier antipope in your calculations). His uncompromising nature led to excommunications by the bucketful and a nasty schism. On his accession in 483 he was faced with a Monophysite patriarch in Alexandria (Middle Eastern Christians tended toward the belief that Christ’s divine nature pretty much eclipsed his human nature) and a well-meaning attempt by the Emperor Zeno to bridge the Monophysite/Chalcedonian gap with a document known as the Henoticon. Felix’s response was to denounce the emperor and the Alexandrian bishop and excommunicate Acacius the Patriarch of Constantinople. This provoked a schism between Rome and Constantinople that lasted for decades.
Felix was equally rigid in his treatment of North African Christians who had submitted to an Arian baptism after persecution by the Vandals. He announced that they could be reconciled to the Catholic communion only on their deathbed.
For some reason he was deemed to be a saint. He is not to be confused with Felix of Nola, the patron saint of spiders.
It is Michel de Montaigne’s birthday and I make so bold as to post a re-run of a previous blog in which the 19th-century antiquarian Robert Chambers praises the noble Frenchman of the sixteenth century.
I often wonder which five characters I would like to have lunch with. I always start by thinking of Samuel Johnson, but I fear he would prove too dogmatical for my other guests. I know that Montaigne would behave well no matter who his companions were.
The father of Montaigne was a baron of Perigord. Having found Latin a dreary and difficult study in his youth, he determined to make it an easy one for his son. He procured a tutor from Germany, ignorant of French, and gave orders that he should converse with the boy in nothing but Latin, and directed, moreover, that none of the household should address him otherwise than in that tongue. “They all became Latinised,”‘ says Montaigne; “and even the villagers in the neighbourhood learned words in that language, some of which took root in the country, and became of common use among the people.” Greek he was taught by similar artifice, feeling it a pastime rather than a task.
At the age of six, he was sent to the College of Guienne, then reputed the best in France, and, strange as it seems, his biographers relate, that at thirteen he had run through the prescribed course of studies, and completed his education. He next turned his attention to law, and at twenty-one was made conseiller, or judge, in the parliament of Bordeaux. He visited Paris, and was received at court, enjoyed the favour of Henri II, saw Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and entered fully into the delights and dissipations of gay society. At thirty-three he was married though had he been left free to his choice, he “would not have wedded with Wisdom herself had she been willing. But ’tis not much to the purpose,” he writes, “to resist custom, for the common usance of life will be so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice.” Of women, indeed, he seldom speaks save in terms of easy contempt, and for the hardships of married life he has frequent jeers.
In 1571, in his thirty-eighth year, the death of his father enabled Montaigne to retire from the practice of law, and to settle on the patrimonial estate. It was predicted he would soon exhaust his fortune, but, on the contrary, he proved a good economist, and turned his farms to excellent account. His good sense, his probity, and liberal soul, won for him the esteem of his province; and though the civil wars of the League converted every house into a fort, he kept his gates open, and the neighbouring gentry brought him their jewels and papers to hold in safe-keeping. He placed his library in a tower overlooking the entrance to his court-yard, and there spent his leisure in reading, meditation, and writing. On the central rafter he inscribed: I do not understand; I pause; I examine. He took to writing for want of something to do, and having nothing else to write about, he began to write about himself, jotting down what came into his head when not too lazy. He found paper a patient listener, and excused his egotism by the consideration, that if his grandchildren were of the same mind as himself, they would he glad to know what sort of man he was. “What should I give to listen to some one who could tell me the ways, the look, the bearing, the commonest words of my ancestors!” If the world should complain that he talked too much about himself, he would answer the world that it talked and thought of everything but itself.
A volume of these egotistic gossips he published at Bordeaux in 1580, and the book quickly passed into circulation. About this time he was attacked with [kidney] stone, a disease he had held in dread from childhood, and the pleasure of the remainder of his life was broken with paroxysms of severe pain. “When they suppose me to be most cast down,” he writes, “and spare me, I often try my strength, and start subjects of conversation quite foreign to my state. I can do everything by a sudden effort, but, oh! take away duration. I am tried severely, for I have suddenly passed from a very sweet and happy condition of life, to the most painful that can be imagined.”
Abhorring doctors and drugs, he sought diversion and relief in a journey through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. At Rome he was kindly received by the pope and cardinals, and invested with the freedom of the city, an honour of which he was very proud. He kept a journal of this tour, which, after lying concealed in an old chest in his chateau for nearly two hundred years, was brought to light and published in 1774; and, as may be supposed, it contains a stock of curious and original information. While he was travelling, he was elected mayor of Bordeaux, an office for which he had no inclination, but Henry III insisted that he should accept it, and at he end of two years he was re-elected for the same period.
During a visit to Paris, he became acquainted with Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young lady who had conceived an ardent friendship for him through reading his Essays. She visited him, accompanied by her mother, and he reciprocated her attachment by treating her as his daughter. Meanwhile, his health grew worse, and feeling his end was drawing near, and sick of the intolerance and bloodshed which devastated France, he kept at home, correcting and retouching his writings. A quinsy [throat infection] terminated his life. He gathered his friends round his bedside, and bade them farewell. A priest said mass, and at the elevation of the host he raised himself in bed, and with hands clasped in prayer, expired. Mademoiselle de Gournay and her mother crossed half France, risking the perils of the roads, that they might condole with his widow and daughter.
It is superfluous to praise Montaigne’s Essays; they have long passed the ordeal of time into assured immortality. He was one of the earliest discoverers of the power and genius of the French language, and may he said to have been the inventor of that charming form of literature—the essay. At a time when authorship was stiff, solemn, and exhaustive, confined to Latin and the learned, he broke into the vernacular, and wrote for everybody with the ease and nonchalance of conversation. The Essays furnish a rambling auto-biography of their author, and not even Rousseau turned himself inside out with more completeness. He gives, with inimitable candour, an account of his likes and dislikes, his habits, foibles, and virtues. He pretends to most of the vices; and if there be any goodness in him, he says he got it by stealth. In his opinion, there is no man who has not deserved hanging five or six times, and he claims no exception in his own behalf. “Five or six as ridiculous stories,” he says, “may he told of me as of any man living.” This very frankness has caused some to question his sincerity, but his dissection of his own inconsistent self is too consistent with flesh and blood to be anything but natural.
Bit by bit the reader of the Essays grows familiar with Montaigne; and he must have a dull imagination indeed who fails to conceive a distinct picture of the thick-set, square-built, clumsy little man, so undersized that he did not like walking, because the mud of the streets bespattered him to the middle, and the rude crowd jostled and elbowed him. He disliked Protestantism, but his mind was wholly averse to bigotry and persecution. Gibbon, indeed, reckons Montaigne and Henri IV as the only two men of liberality in the France of the sixteenth century. Nothing more distinguishes Montaigne than his deep sense of the uncertainty and provisional character of human knowledge; and Mr. Emerson has well chosen him for a type of the sceptic. Montaigne’s device—a pair of scales evenly balanced, with the motto, Quo scais je? (What do I know?)—perfectly symbolises the man.
The only book we have which we certainly know was handled by Shakespeare, is a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. It contains the poet’s autograph, and was purchased. by the British Museum for one hundred and twenty guineas. A second copy of the same translation in the Museum has Ben Jonson’s name on the fly-leaf.
Have you got a favourite Byzantine emperor? I know some folks favour Basil II “the Bulgar-Slayer” for his famous victory at Kleidion, while others are partial to Nikephoras II Phokas, “White Death of the Saracens”, for his successes on the eastern border against Islamic encroachment. And who can forget Justinian II with his solid-gold nose prosthesis and stirring comeback against mutilation and exile? Romantics, of course, swoon over Constantine XI and his last stand against the Turks in 1453.
My choice, however, would be Theodosius II (401-450). Not only did his reign see the construction of the mighty Theodosian Walls which kept invaders at bay for over a thousand years, the rehabilitation of the reputation of John Chrysostom, and a new codification of Roman law, but it also saw the establishment of the world’s first university.
The University of Constantinople (or Pandidakterion) was founded on this date in 425. The school boasted 31 chairs, split between Greek and Latin instruction. Subjects taught included rhetoric, law, philosophy, medicine, music arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The institution was meant to train the empire’s administrators and elite. It should be noted that women were admitted, at least to the medical school.
Apparently Theodosius founded the University at the urging of his wife Eudocia who was a big fan of education. Alas, the marriage between emperor and empress foundered on his suspicions of her adultery in the Case of the Really Big Apple. The pair parted in 443 and she spent the rest of her life in Jerusalem hanging around with Monophysites and doing good works.
On this date in 1939 the Wepner family in New York City welcomed the arrival of a son, Charles. The lad grew up in straitened circumstances in Bayonne, New Jersey where he learned how to fight at an early age. After a spell in the Marines, Wepner became a professional boxer at a high level, earning fights with (and losing decisively to) pugilistic luminaries such as Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, and Muhammed Ali. He once fought a bear, and was reputed to be the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, but what brings him to your attention today is his famous nickname: “The Bayonne Bleeder”.
Since the days of bareknuckle contests, boxers have had nicknames – heavyweight champ James John Corbett, for example, whose sobriquets “Gentleman Jim” and “The Dancing Master” spoke to his stylish technique. Similarly named were “Sugar” Ray Robinson and Archie Moore, “The Mongoose”.
Some monikers are bestowed because of geographical origins — John L.Sullivan, “The Boston Strong Boy” or Argentinian Luis Firpo, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas”. Jack Dempsey was “The Manassa Mauler” and Tommy Hearns of Detroit was “The Motor City Cobra”. Larry Holmes was “The Easton Assassin”. Barry McGuigan who first saw the light of day in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland was inevitably known as “The Clones Cyclone”. Who said Voltairean wit was dead?
Size can get a guy a name. Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera was called “The Ambling Alp”, “The Gentle Giant” and “The Vast Venetian”.
Some nicknames were racial, as in the case of Peter “Black Prince” Jackson or Gerry Cooney, “The Great White Hope”. Did you know that, before he was dubbed “The Brown Bomber”, Joe Lewis was saddled with hearing himself referred to as “The Dark Destroyer”, “The Sepia Socker” and “The Coffee-Colored KO King”?
Many sportswriters cannot avoid puns and so we have Michael “Second to” Nunn or Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquaio. Breidis Prescott defeated hitherto-unbeaten Amir Khan and was thereafter known as “The Khanqueror”. James Broad could not escape the tag “Broad-Axe”.
Most boxing nicknames, however, attempt to convey an aura of menace. Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran; Jake LaMotta, “The Raging Bull”; “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier; “Bonecrusher” Smith (who actually had a university degree in business administration); and my favourite, Marco Antonio Barrera, “The Baby-Faced Assassin” whose scientific thrashing of the insufferable Prince Naseem Hamed was such a pleasure to watch in 2001.
The people of the eastern Baltic were the last Europeans to be Christianized, clinging to their polytheism despite attempts by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches to evangelize them. The orders of the Northern Crusade – the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order – took it upon themselves to wage war against the pagans (and occasionally their Orthodox neighbours), enforce conversion, and spread Germanic hegemony. History records many notable battles fought by these western knights, the most famous of which was the Battle on the Ice memorialized by Sergei Eisenstein in his epic 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.
(It’s a jolly little piece of Stalinist propaganda with a musical score by Prokofiev that I will deal with here in the future.)
The knights lost that fight, but on this day in 1336 they were triumphant in an attack on a pagan stronghold of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the hill fort at Pilėnai. A force of some 6,000, mostly German but also French and Austrian nobles and their detachments, approached the fort in which thousands of refugees had sought shelter. According to medieval chroniclers, the people panicked and resolved to kill themselves rather than be captured and enslaved. One elderly woman was said to have axed 100 people to death before killing herself. The commander of the defenders, Duke Margris, slew his own wife and guards before committing suicide.
The significance of the fight was its role in buttressing Lithuanian nationalism. The battle inspired epic poems, novels, operas, and historic re-enactments.
Since 1942 BBC Radio has broadcast a show entitled “Desert Island Discs”, called by some the “greatest radio programme of all time”. Each week a guest is asked to imagine that he or she is a castaway on some deserted shore who is allowed to bring along a book (not including a Bible and the works of Shakespeare), 8 recordings, and a luxury item (which cannot allow one to escape or communicate with the outside world.) Much interesting chatter ensues as the guests justify their choices.
If I were to choose a single book with which to while away the months or years on my coral atoll, I would choose Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up, first published in 1621. Among its many virtues are its length (over 1,000 pages), encyclopedic scope, and its depth of understanding of the human condition.
Burton was an Oxford academic suffering from what we would call today a clinical depression. One of the ways he dealt with his mental state, and to help others with theirs, was to examine the condition in light of medical knowledge and philosophy. The result was The Anatomy of Melancholy.
The ancient notion of mind and body being governed by the “four humours” still ruled early-modern medicine. To be healthy (or in “good humour”) was to enjoy a balance of four liquids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. A predominance of blood led to a sanguine personality (active, bold); phlegm to a phlegmatic disposition (cold, dispassionate); yellow bile to being choleric (prone to anger, daring); and black bile to being melancholic – a state that included not just depression but a host of other mental challenges. By examining the condition of melancholy Burton is led to discourse on innumerable topics in medicine, science, philosophy, literature, love, geography, etc. As he says: “No Centaurs here, or Gorgons look to find,/ My subject is of man, and human kind.”
The Anatomy of Melancholy is not an easy book to read. Burton’s range of learning was vast and he was wont to cite sources unfamiliar to most scholars today. He also loved to quote in Latin, sometimes translating, sometimes not. This sentence is typical: “When I first took this task in hand, et quod ait ille, impellents genio negotium suscepi, this I aimed at; vel ut lenirem animum scribendo, to ease my mind by writing”. But after a while the eye skips over the Latin and reassembles the sentence. Here are some pertinent quotes:
Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or habit. In disposition, is that transitory melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causeth anguish, dullness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions, [925]no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality.Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse; envy alone wants both. Other sins last but for awhile; the gut may be satisfied, anger remits, hatred hath an end, envy never ceaseth.
[Diseases] crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.
[The rich] are indeed rather possessed by their money than possessors.
Though they [philosophers] write contemptu gloriæ, yet as Hieron observes, they will put their names to their books.
Aristotle said melancholy men of all others are most witty.
Machiavel says virtue and riches seldom settle on one man.
Every man, as the saying is, can tame a shrew but he that hath her.
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases…but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.
England is a paradise for women and hell for horses; Italy a paradise for horses, hell for women.
What physic, what chirurgery, what wealth, favor, authority can relieve, bear out, assuage, or expel a troubled conscience? A quiet mind cureth all them, but all they cannot comfort a distressed soul: who can put to silence the voice of desperation?
Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayst be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, &c.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art.
And yet with crimes to us unknown, Our sons shall mark the coming age their own.
As Petrarch observes, we change language, habits, laws, customs, manners, but not vices, not diseases, not the symptoms of folly and madness, they are still the same.
Polycarp (69-155) was a bishop of Asia Minor who had, according to tradition, studied under St. John, the last of the original Twelve Apostles, thus an important link between primitive Christianity and the expanding Church. Called upon to apostatize and worship the imperial cult, Polycarp refused, saying: “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King and Saviour? You threaten me with a fire that burns for a season, and after a little while is quenched; but you are ignorant of the fire of everlasting punishment that is prepared for the wicked.” He was burned at the state. He is the patron saint of those suffering from dysentery and earache.
303 The Beginning of the Great Persecution
Christianity had been intermittently subject to persecution since its inception but there were two periods of intense and focussed attempts to exterminate the new religion, one in the mid-3rd century under the emperor Decius and, the second and most murderous, under Diocletian beginning on this date in 303 when he attacked the church in the eastern capital Nicomedia. Diocletian had embarked on a successful series of reforms to rehabilitate the empire’s finances, military strength, and cohesion. Christians, by refusing to worship the emperor or any of the other Roman gods, were thus a political threat.
Image of the majestic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey.
532 The foundation of Hagia Sophia is laid
In the two centuries following the persecutions of Diocletian, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire. The greatest church in Christendom (and the most imposing building on Earth for the next millennium) was the Church of Holy Wisdom, commissioned by the emperor Justinian to replace the one destroyed during the Nike Rebellion. Pictured above is how it would have looked before it was converted to a mosque in the 15th century and the addition of four minarets.
1455 The printing of the Gutenberg Bible
Though the Chinese had used block printing for centuries, Europe had lacked a way of mechanically reproducing books until Johann Gutenberg of Mainz invented a moveable-type press. The first fruit of his labours was a Vulgate Bible, a 5th-century Latin translation by St Jerome of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. This was a moment whose revolutionary impact cannot be over-estimated.
