Justified True Belief

(●) The goldsmith who never wrote a book, and whose printing press changed what every book after him would be. + Pick up any printed Bible. Somebody had to think of it: not the words, which are older than Europe, but the idea that a page could be assembled out of small metal pieces, inked, pressed onto paper, and then taken apart so the same pieces could make the next page, and the next, and a thousand more. Before that idea, every copy of Scripture in the West was written out by hand, a job that took a trained scribe the better part of a year. After it, a shop of a dozen men could turn out a hundred and eighty Bibles in about two years. The man who put the pieces together was a Mainz goldsmith named Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. He belongs on a Christian apologetics shelf for a simple reason: the argument about whether ordinary people should read the Bible for themselves was a very different argument once ordinary people could afford one. Nothing in the Reformation, in the missionary centuries that followed, or in the habit you have of owning a Bible rather than borrowing one, works the same way without his workshop. Here is the fact about him that a reader will remember. He signed nothing. Not one of the books that came off his press carries the name of its printer or the name of its town. He left no letters, no memoir, no sentence of his own about God or about what he thought he had done. Everything known about him comes from lawsuits, loan papers, and the books themselves, and even the portrait that hangs in every schoolroom is an invention, first drawn a century after his death.

(●) c. 1400 AD: Born in Mainz into a patrician house with a share in the archbishop’s mint. + Nobody knows the year. Scholars have proposed anything from 1393 to 1406, and the round figure of 1400 was settled on for convenience when Mainz wanted a five-hundredth birthday to celebrate. A tradition puts the day at 24 June, the feast of John the Baptist, on the reasonable but unprovable ground that a boy called Johannes was probably named for the saint whose day he was born on. Every date in the first forty years of his life should be read with that softness in mind. His father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, was a patrician: one of the old families who ran Mainz, held its offices, and drew income from the archbishop’s mint, where coins were struck. That is worth pausing over, because it means the boy grew up around men whose daily work was pressing metal dies into soft metal to make thousands of identical objects. His mother, Else Wyrich, was a shopkeeper’s daughter, which in a city that cared a great deal about birth made her sons something less than fully patrician. The family name came from a house, the Hof zum Gutenberg, in the way an English family might be called of Weston Hall. He used the house name all his life, and it is the name on the machine.

(●) 1411 AD: Guild risings drove the patricians out of Mainz, and his youth was spent in and out of exile. + Mainz in the early fifteenth century was a city quarreling with itself. The guilds, the sworn associations of craftsmen who made and sold things, wanted a share of the government the old families had kept for themselves, and the city had borrowed itself into trouble paying the annuities it owed those same families. An annuity worked like a loan running the other way: a man handed the council a lump of money once, and the council owed him a fixed sum every year afterwards, often for the rest of his life. It was the safest investment a patrician could make and the most awkward debt a city could carry, because it never finished. In February 1411 the quarrel turned violent, and by August at least a hundred and seventeen patricians had left town, his father Friele among them. In January 1413 hunger riots sent the family out again, most likely to Eltville on the Rhine, where his mother’s people held property. A boy of ten or eleven lived through the first of those departures, and the family fortunes never quite recovered. His father died in the autumn of 1419, and the inheritance proceedings that followed are among the first places the young Johannes is named at all. Then the record thins to almost nothing. What survives is four entries. A quarrel with his brother over the inheritance in 1420. An annuity matter in 1427. A life annuity of thirteen gulden that his mother negotiated for him in January 1430. And a peace settlement that March, in which the archbishop offered the exiled patricians an unconditional amnesty and listed him among the men it was offered to. That is fifteen years of a man’s life, and it fits on a postcard. He never came home to take that amnesty, and nobody knows where he was living instead or what he was learning there. What is clear from what follows is that somewhere in those thin years he became a competent goldsmith, and that somewhere in them he began to think about letters.

(●) 1439 AD: In Strasbourg a partner died, and the lawsuit that followed left the first written trace of printing. + By March 1434 he was living in Strasbourg, where the city’s papers later show him as an associate of the goldsmiths and an armed man on the tax roll, and behaving like a man with grievances. He had Nikolaus Woerstadt, the town clerk of Mainz, arrested over three hundred and ten gulden of annuity the city owed him, and released him only when Mainz promised to pay. In 1436 a Strasbourg patrician named Ennelin took him to court over a broken promise of marriage. How that ended, nobody knows. The venture that matters began as a religious one. Every seven years the relics of Aachen were displayed to enormous crowds, and pilgrims bought small polished metal mirrors to hold up in the press of the crowd, on the belief that a mirror could catch and carry home some of the holiness streaming off the relics. That sounds strange now. It was an ordinary thing to buy then, which is exactly why four men thought there was money in it, and Gutenberg and three partners went in together to manufacture them. Then the crowds did not come. The partners had counted on 1439, and the pilgrimage fell in 1440 instead, whether because they had miscounted the seven-year cycle or because flooding put it off. A year is a long time to wait when the money has already been spent, and the mirrors sat unsold. One of the partners, Andrew Dritzehen, had mortgaged everything he owned to stay in. He fell ill around Christmas 1438 and died. Mydehart Stocker, in whose room he lay sick, later told the court what the dying man had said to him: "I believe that I am on my death-bed. If I am about to die, I wish that I had never been connected with the association." His brothers sued, asking to be let into the partnership in his place, and Gutenberg refused and won. He won, but he lost his privacy. The depositions of some sixteen witnesses survive, and they are the earliest written evidence of European printing that exists. They talk about a press, about a form made of four pieces lying in it, about a goldsmith paid for work "connected with printing," and about a man frantic that nobody should see how the four pieces fitted together.

(●) c. 1450 AD: Back in Mainz, eight hundred gulden from Johann Fust bought him a workshop. + He was home in Mainz by 1448, borrowing money through a kinsman named Arnold Gelthus. Around 1450 he found a much larger lender. Johann Fust was a Mainz businessman with capital, and he advanced eight hundred gulden against the security of Gutenberg’s tools, with a further three hundred a year for expenses and wages, house rent, vellum, paper and ink on top of that. In 1452 he put in eight hundred more, this time as a partner in what the court papers call the work of the books. Try to feel the size of that. A complete printed Bible would later sell for about thirty florins, roughly three years’ wages for a clerk, and florin and gulden are two names for the same Rhineland gold coin, so all these sums can be compared straight across. Sixteen hundred gulden was a fortune staked on a machine nobody had seen work, by a man in his fifties who had already sunk one partner’s whole estate. And the machine was not one invention but a knot of them, each of which had to work before any of the others was worth anything: a steel punch with a letter cut on its end, a copper matrix struck from the punch, an adjustable hand mould that let the same mould cast any width of letter, an alloy soft enough to cast and hard enough to print, an oily ink that would cling to metal instead of beading off it, and a screw press adapted from the winepresses of the Rhineland. Any one of those could be got right by a clever man. All six at once is another kind of problem. Then there was the bench work, which is the part nobody pictures. A skilled cutter could finish perhaps one or two punches a day, and the set of letters, ligatures and abbreviations the Bible type needed runs to something like two hundred and ninety characters. A ligature is two or three letters cast together on one piece of metal, fi or ffl joined the way a scribe’s pen would have joined them, and a page meant to look handwritten needs a great many of them. At one or two punches a day, the better part of a year went by at the bench before a single word could be set.

(●) 1455 AD: The Bible was finished, and in the same year a court handed the workshop to Fust. + The Bible was done, or nearly, by the spring of 1455. Heinrich Cremer, vicar of the collegiate church of St Stephen in Mainz (a church served by a staff of clergy rather than by a single parish priest), worked as a rubricator: the man who takes a book the press has left unfinished and puts in by hand the red headings and the large coloured initials. He finished illuminating and binding one copy, and he noted the dates in it, the second volume on 15 August 1456 and the first on 24 August. Those notes are how we know the sheets had come off the press by then. A rubricator can only decorate a book that already exists, so his two dates are the latest the printing can possibly be. Fust sued. On Thursday 6 November 1455, between eleven and twelve in the morning, the parties were summoned to the refectory of the Franciscan friary in Mainz to swear to their accounts before a notary, Ulrich Helmasperger, whose record of the day survives and is the single most important document of Gutenberg’s life. Fust claimed his two loans with interest had grown to about 2,020 gulden. Gutenberg did not come. He sent three men, including a workman named Heinrich Keffer, to hear and see what happened. Fust took the oath and took the judgment. What that meant in practice is that the printing equipment, and very probably the finished Bible sheets, passed to Fust, who went into business with Gutenberg’s own foreman, Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim. Schoeffer married Fust’s daughter. The two of them would print the next famous book out of Mainz, and they would sign it.

(●) 1462 AD: Mainz was sacked, and the workmen who knew the secret scattered across Europe. + Two men claimed the archbishopric of Mainz at once, Diether von Isenburg and Adolf II of Nassau, and in October 1462 Adolf’s troops took the city by storm and burned a good deal of it. Citizens were expelled. Among the people turned out onto the roads were the printers, the only men alive who knew the four operations the whole art rested on: how to cut a punch, the steel rod with a letter standing in relief on its tip; how to strike a matrix from it, the small copper bar carrying that letter sunk into its face; how to cast a sort, which is the trade’s word for one single piece of type; and how to lock up a forme, a whole page of type wedged tight in its frame so that it could be carried to the press without collapsing into a heap of letters. It was the worst thing that happened to Mainz and the best thing that happened to printing. The secret Gutenberg had guarded so fiercely in Strasbourg could not survive its workmen being scattered. Within a decade there were presses in Cologne, Basel, Rome, Venice and Paris, and by 1476 William Caxton had one at Westminster; by 1500 the art had worked in more than two hundred and fifty European towns and produced something like thirty thousand separate editions. The men who carried the art out of Mainz were not visionaries. They were tradesmen looking for work, and they took their trade with them.

(●) 1468 AD: He died a pensioner of the archbishop, with his name on nothing he had printed. + In January 1465 the victorious archbishop, Adolf II of Nassau, made him a Hofmann, a gentleman of the court. The grant was not grand but it was kind: a courtier’s suit of clothes each year, twenty malter of grain and two fuder of wine, something over two thousand litres of each, and exemption from the city’s taxes and duties. It reads like a pension for an old man whom the city knew had done something remarkable, even if nobody could say precisely what. He died early in 1468. The day usually given is 3 February, though that comes down as a tradition rather than as a document; what the papers show is that by 26 February he was dead, because on that day a Mainz doctor of law named Konrad Humery formally acknowledged that the forms, types and tools of printing from the estate had come to him, and promised to sell them only to a citizen of Mainz. He was buried in the Franciscan church at Mainz, which was pulled down in 1742, and the grave is lost. That is the whole estate: a box of type and a lost grave. The first portrait of him, the bearded patriarch of the engravings, was made up for a German biographical collection in 1567, ninety-nine years after he died, by a man who had never seen him.

What He Made

(T1) A page can be built out of reusable parts, cast one letter at a time. + Anyone who has ever had a rubber stamp cut with a home address knows both halves of the problem at once. The stamp does that address beautifully, a hundred times over, and it will never do anything else as long as it exists. Move house and the stamp is firewood. That is worth holding on to, because printing from wood was already old. Chinese craftsmen had been doing it for centuries, and Europeans had been printing playing cards and devotional pictures from carved blocks for decades before Gutenberg. Carving a whole page into a block of wood works, but the block is only ever that page. Finish the job and you have a piece of furniture. At which point a reader is entitled to say: hold on, didn’t the Chinese invent all of this first? They did, and the Koreans went further. Movable type was not new in the world: a Chinese printer was setting type in baked clay in the eleventh century, and Korean printers were casting it in bronze by the thirteenth. What Europe still lacked, and what he supplied, was a way of making the pieces fast enough, alike enough and cheap enough to be worth the trouble. His move was to make the smallest unit a single letter, and to make letters by the thousand out of metal. The sequence runs like this. A steel punch is cut by hand with one letter in relief on its end, the way a jeweler cuts a seal. The punch is struck into a small bar of soft copper, leaving the letter sunk into it; that bar is the matrix. The matrix goes into the bottom of a hand mould, molten alloy is poured in, and out comes a type: a little metal stalk with the letter standing on its face. The mould is the clever part, because it slides to fit any width, so the same mould casts a narrow i and a wide m and holds both to exactly the same height and depth. Set those types in a line, lock the lines into a frame, ink them and press paper down, and you have a page. Break the page up and you have your letters back. Nothing in that list is a single flash of genius, and that is the point. It is a chain of solved problems: the alloy of lead, tin and antimony that casts sharply and does not squash under pressure; an ink thickened with oil and varnish so that it clings to metal, where the water-based ink of the scribes would have slid off; a press taken from the winemakers of the Rhine and given a flat platen, the heavy plate that comes down and presses the sheet onto every letter at the same moment, with the same weight. Every link had to hold. He was the man who made them all hold at once.

(Q) "Within the past two or three years he had received from John Gutenberg about 100 guilders, which sum had been paid to him exclusively for work connected with printing." + Source: deposition of Hans Duenne, goldsmith, in the Dritzehen lawsuit, Strasbourg, 1439 (De Vinne translation). The shortest testimony taken in the case, and the only one that names the trade. The German phrase behind "work connected with printing" is das zu dem trucken gehoret, roughly "that which belongs to printing," and it is the earliest appearance of the word in any document that names him. A hundred gulden was a great deal to pay a goldsmith, and the likeliest thing he was being paid for is punch-cutting (T1).

(T2) The secret was worth more than the machine, and he guarded it to the end. + There were no patents. A fifteenth-century craftsman who invented something protected it the only way available, by not letting anyone see it, and Gutenberg protected his with a thoroughness that comes through even in dry court German. The Strasbourg partners were bound by a written agreement not to divulge the work. When Andrew Dritzehen died, Gutenberg’s servant Lorenz Beildeck was sent within days to the dead man’s brother with an errand about four pieces lying in a press: take them out, separate them, and do it before anyone looks. Another witness, Conrad Sahspach, was the man who had made the press, and even he was asked to do the same job by a different partner. When Sahspach went to look, on St Stephen’s day, the thing had already gone. Read that scene slowly and it tells you what kind of object those four pieces were. Nobody was worried about the press; presses were ordinary, and the man who made this one was standing right there. What had to vanish was the small assembly sitting in it, the thing that would give the game away to anyone who saw it whole. Historians differ about exactly what it was, a type mould or a forme of set type being the usual guesses, and nobody can settle it, because the man whose whole purpose was that no one should see it succeeded.

(Q) "Dear Claus Dritzehen, the late Andrew Dritzehen had four pieces lying in a press, and Gutenberg begs that you will take them away from the press, and that you will separate them, so that no one can see what it is, for he does not wish that anyone should see it." + Source: Lorenz Beildeck’s errand, reported in the deposition of Dame Ennel Dritzehen, Strasbourg, 1439 (De Vinne translation). Beildeck was Gutenberg’s personal servant, and Ennel Dritzehen was in the house and heard him deliver the message. She also told the court something quieter and sadder: that she had sat up with her cousin Andrew night and day while he worked at this, and that he had mortgaged his capital to do it, though how much of it went into the work she could not say (T2).

(T3) The first great book from the new art was the Bible, made to pass for a manuscript. + He could have started with something easy. He chose the Latin Vulgate, Jerome’s fourth-century translation and the Bible of the whole Western church: two volumes, roughly twelve hundred and eighty pages, two columns to the page and forty-two lines to the column, which is why bibliographers call it the B42. What is striking about it is that it was not trying to look new. The type imitates the heavy formal hand of a Rhineland scribe, right down to a small forest of ligatures and abbreviations so that the printed line would break where a written line broke. Spaces were left for the coloured initials and headings, which were still painted in by hand afterwards. A buyer in 1455 was not meant to think "a machine made this." He was meant to think this is an unusually good Bible, and then, perhaps, to notice that his neighbour’s copy was identical to his, page for page, letter for letter, which had never in the history of the world been true of two Bibles before. About a hundred and eighty copies were made, three quarters of them on paper and the rest on vellum, which is calfskin prepared for writing, and which meant a herd of calves for every skin-copy. Forty-eight or forty-nine copies survive somewhere in the world today. Meanwhile the same shop kept the lights on with humbler work: thousands of single-sheet letters of indulgence, printed in 1454 and 1455 to raise money for the defence of Cyprus against the Turks, and a German verse calendar warning Christendom about the same Turks. An indulgence, in the teaching of the medieval church, was a remission of the temporal punishment still owed for sins already confessed and forgiven, and by the fifteenth century one could be had by contributing to a worthy cause; the letter was the sheet that recorded the grant, and a sheet is exactly the sort of thing a press can produce by the thousand while a Bible is still being set. Those small jobs, not the Bible, are the earliest precisely dated pieces of European printing that survive, because a clerk wrote a date on them in ink.

(Q) "I have not seen complete Bibles, but several quires belonging to different books, exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, which Your Grace could read effortlessly, even without glasses." + Source: Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, letter to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal, 12 March 1455 (translated by Martin Davies). Piccolomini, then bishop of Siena and later Pope Pius II, is writing from the imperial diet at Wiener Neustadt about a marvellous man at Frankfurt whose work he had gone to look at the previous autumn: unbound sheets of a printed Bible, shown to anyone who cared to see them. A quire is simply a folded gathering of sheets, what a binder sews together to make a book. He adds that he had been told a hundred and fifty-eight copies were finished though others said a hundred and eighty, and that he could not get one for the cardinal because ready buyers had been found before the volumes were done. It is the earliest datable notice of a printed book anywhere in Europe, and it is a review: the thing is legible (T3).

(T4) The art was finished by other hands, and the men who finished it left his name off. + Two years after the judgment, Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer published the Mainz Psalter, a magnificent folio of the Psalms with two-colour initials printed rather than painted, and at the end of it they did something no printed book had done before. They put a colophon: a closing paragraph naming who made the book, where, and on what day. Read the wording and you can watch two men taking credit without quite claiming it. They do not say they invented printing. They say the book was made by the masterly invention of printing and of type-making, without the writing of a pen, by Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, and they let the sentence do its work. Gutenberg is not mentioned. He had taught Schoeffer the trade; the types are in the family of his Bible types; there is a fair case that the Psalter was planned in his shop before he lost it. Within a generation people were saying Schoeffer was the inventor. There is no record that Gutenberg ever answered, and there is no record of his printing his own name on anything, before or after. Whatever else he was, he was not a man who wanted the credit badly enough to take it.

(Q) "This book of Psalms, decorated with antique initials, and sufficiently emphasized with rubricated letters, has been thus made by the masterly invention of printing and also of type-making, without the writing of a pen, and is consummated to the service of God, through the industry of Johan Fust, citizen of Mentz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gernszheim, in the year of our Lord 1457, on the eve of the Assumption." + Source: colophon of the Mainz Psalter, 14 August 1457 (De Vinne translation; Mentz is the old English spelling of Mainz). The first printed book to tell its reader who printed it and when, and the ancestor of the printed title page. "Rubricated" means marked in red, from the Latin for red chalk, and the Psalter’s great red and blue initials were printed in colour rather than painted in afterwards, which is the boast buried in the sentence (T4).

(Q) "By the assistance of the most High, at whose will the tongues of children become eloquent, and who often reveals to babes what He hides from the wise, this renowned book, the Catholicon, was printed and perfected in the year of Incarnation 1460, in the beloved city of Mentz... not by means of pen, or pencil, or stencil plate, but by the admirable proportion, harmony and connection of the punches and matrices." + Source: colophon of the Catholicon, Mainz, 1460 (De Vinne translation). The colophon goes on to give praise and honour to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and it is the closest thing to a confession of faith anywhere near Gutenberg. The opening braids two texts together. The tongues of children made eloquent comes from the book of Wisdom, which stood in the Old Testament of every Vulgate (Wisdom 10:21), and the hiding from the wise and revealing to babes is the Lord’s own thanksgiving (Matthew 11:25). Whether Gutenberg printed the book is argued: the types are not those of his Bible, the workshop cannot be identified with certainty, and scholars have proposed several candidates. But the sentence is worth reading either way, because it is what the first printers thought they were doing. They had not made a business. They had been given something, and the proper response to a gift is a doxology: a short set formula of praise to God, of the kind that closes a psalm or a prayer.

What the Church Made of It

(†) The church was the new art’s first customer, and the art spread on church business. + Most of us carry a rough picture of what happened next, and it runs something like this: the press appears, the clergy see their monopoly break, and machine and church are at war from the first morning. The first fifty years of printing say something else. The church was the customer. Bibles, missals for the altar, breviaries for the daily office, psalters for the choir, the Donatus grammars that every cathedral school beat into its boys, indulgence forms by the thousand: these are what paid for the presses, and a great share of everything printed before 1500 is religious. Rome noticed and approved. In 1468 Giovanni Andrea Bussi, bishop of Aleria, who worked as editor for the two German printers then at Rome, dedicated their edition of Jerome’s letters to Pope Paul II and told him that God had given Christendom a gift in their own lifetime, one that put books within reach of a poor man, and that the price of a book had fallen by four fifths. Cardinals commissioned editions of their own, and monastic houses put presses inside the cloister, in the same buildings where the copying had always been done by hand. The scale is the thing to hold on to. A scribe copying a Bible by hand was a year’s labour per copy, so the hundred and eighty copies of the B42 represent something close to a hundred and eighty scribe-years of work, done in a room in Mainz in about two. By 1500 presses had worked in more than two hundred and fifty towns and printed roughly thirty thousand editions. The Scriptures, the fathers, the councils and the schoolmen all became things a parish priest might own rather than things he might once have seen.

(†) Within a lifetime of his death the same machine put Scripture into the hands of ploughboys. + Take two men who tried something like this before there was a press. Jan Hus was burned in 1415, and his movement stayed in Bohemia. John Wycliffe’s English Bible was copied by hand, one manuscript at a time, and the copies were hunted down the same way, one by one. Then, a hundred years later, Martin Luther sent out ninety-five theses from a university town in Saxony, and inside two months they were being read in Basel, Leipzig and Nuremberg, because printers who had never met him set them up and sold them. That is the difference the machine made, and it is a difference of speed rather than of ideas. As John Foxe tells it, William Tyndale answered a learned man who had said they would be better without God’s law than the pope’s: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." He could say it because a press existed. Luther’s German New Testament of 1522 sold its whole first printing of about three thousand copies within three months, and a second edition was on sale by December. Faith comes from hearing (Romans 10:17), and for a thousand years hearing had meant standing where a priest was reading; now it could also mean a ploughman with a book in his coat. The English martyrologist John Foxe, in the enlarged 1570 edition of his Acts and Monuments, put the judgment of the Reformers on Gutenberg’s invention about as bluntly as it can be put: "hereby tongues are known, knowledge groweth, judgement increaseth, books are dispersed, the Scripture is seen, the doctors be read, stories be opened, times compared, truth discerned, falsehood detected, and with finger pointed, and all (as I said) through the benefit of printing." He drew the obvious conclusion, that either the pope must abolish knowledge and printing, or printing would in the end root him out. Foxe is a partisan and reads like one. He is also describing something that actually happened.

(†) Where his own record will not bear praising: the secrecy, the debts, and the work he never chose. + Honesty requires the other column, and in his case the ledger is short, because so little of him survives to judge. Three entries can be made from the documents themselves. - He built the first mass medium and spent his life stopping people from seeing it. That was ordinary craft practice and he was within his rights, and the court agreed with him. It is still a strange thing to hold next to what the press became. The man who made copies cheap was, in his own shop, the most secretive tradesman in Mainz, and he sent a servant to a grieving household within days of a death to make sure a piece of equipment was taken apart before the family looked at it. - He took money he could not pay back, twice, and other people bore it. Andrew Dritzehen mortgaged his capital, worked himself into a sickbed, and died wishing he had never joined. Johann Fust lent sixteen hundred gulden and had to borrow at interest to do it. Gutenberg was not a swindler; the Strasbourg court and the Mainz court both heard him out and neither found fraud. He was something commoner and no less costly, a man whose project always needed more than he had said it would. - He printed whatever paid, and no word survives of what he thought any of it was for. The earliest precisely dated work of his press is a letter of indulgence, a printed form with a blank for the buyer’s name, sold to fund the defence of Cyprus. That was lawful and unremarkable church business in 1454, and the fault is not in the job; it is that beyond the Bible itself there is no sign of him choosing what the new art would carry rather than taking the work that came. The crusade calendar was the same kind of work, and so were the schoolroom grammars. One more thing should be said and then left alone. Not a line survives in which he speaks about God. Near the end of his life he is entered as a lay member of the brotherhood of St Victor, the collegiate church outside Mainz that his family had been tied to for generations, and he was buried with the Franciscans. That is the whole of the evidence about his religion. To make him a man of holy purpose would be to invent him. What can be said is what he chose to make when he finally had the machine: not a romance, not an almanac, but the Bible, in the best workmanship he could manage.