The legendary Flemish printer, Christophe Plantin (who gave his name to a typeface), died today in 1589. His most famous, as well as most complex, production was the King’s Bible, which produced the complete text of the Bible in separate columns of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac. Thirteen presses, 55 print workers and one Spanish theologian were involved in producing the eight huge volumes of the King’s Bible, and Plantin mortgaged his printing house in Antwerp (seen above) to fund it.
The first issue of the Watchtower, the monthly magazine famously handed out by Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on people’s doors, was published today in 1879, in Pittsburgh. Its original title was Zion’s Watch Tower and Herald of Christ’s Presence, and it announced that ‘we are living in the last days’, a constant theme ever since, delivered entirely without irony.
It is St Oliver Plunket’s Day, the Irish Catholic Archbishop who was hanged, drawn and quartered today in 1681 by the British government for his part in the Popish Plot. It was a tough break as not only did he have no part in the plot, but there wasn’t one. It was a conspiracy theory invented by an Anglican priest, Titus Oates, that Catholics were plotting to assassinate King Charles II and bring about a French invasion, which they weren’t. Plunket was the last Catholic to die a martyr’s death in England, and was made a saint in 1975.
Today in 1959, three psychiatric patients – Clyde, Joseph and Leon – each of them with a delusion that they were Christ, were brought together in Ward D-23 of Ypsilanti State Hospital, Michigan, to talk to each other. For the next two years they met daily as part of a research project, in the hope that each of them, confronted with two other ‘Christs’, would be shocked out of their delusion. The experiment, which failed to change the men’s beliefs, resulted in the 1964 book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.
The English Protestant John Bradford was burned at the stake by Queen Mary’s men in Smithfield, London, today in 1555. He had been chaplain to Mary’s predecessor, Edward VI. His last words were to a young man, John Leaf, who was burned with him: ‘Be of good comfort, brother, for we shall have a merry supper with the Lord this night.’
Image: Simon Jenkins