The Codex Gigas weighs 75 kg and took around 160 animal skins to make. Legend says a doomed monk wrote it in a single night with the Devil's help — and its handwriting is so uniform it may really be one person's life's work.
The legend that gave the book its nickname: a monk condemned to be walled up alive bargains with Satan to finish an impossible manuscript before dawn.
Separating the pact-with-the-Devil myth from what scholars can actually trace about the scribe and the monastery of Podlažice.
The largest surviving medieval manuscript: around 310 leaves, a complete Latin Bible, Josephus, Isidore of Seville, medical texts, and exorcism spells — all in one volume.
The institution that has guarded the Codex since 1648 lays out its dimensions, its texts, and the single remarkable hand that wrote all 600-plus pages.
From a Bohemian monastery to Rudolf II's cabinet of curiosities to a Swedish army's saddlebags in 1648 — the strange journey that stranded it in Stockholm.
Why the manuscript still unsettles people: the missing pages, the uniform script no committee could produce, and the lone full-page Devil staring out of the vellum.