Letter to Cardinal Juan de Carvajal
A letter written from Wiener Neustadt by the future Pope Pius II, reporting that he had seen gatherings of a printed Bible offered at Frankfurt the previous autumn. It is the earliest account of the Gutenberg Bible.
Read the text at rylandscollections.com ↗Summary of the letter by Princeton University Library, which holds the Scheide copy of the Bible ↗
Piccolomini, then bishop of Siena, wrote to his friend Cardinal Carvajal in Rome. He confirms what the cardinal had heard about “that miraculous man” seen at Frankfurt. He had not seen whole Bibles, he says, but several quires of different books, in very clean and correct lettering that could be read without glasses. Witnesses told him that 158 copies had been finished, though some said 180, and he feared he could not buy one because buyers had been found before the volumes were complete.
The passage quoted does not name the man or the place of printing. It fixes a date by which sheets of the Bible were on show, and it gives the figures then being reported for the number of copies. See Gutenberg Prints the Bible.
Cited in
- c. 1454–1455, estimated date