Today is the birthday of Jost Amman, a prolific Swiss-German illustrator who produced the woodcuts for one of the earliest illustrated Bibles, printed in Frankfurt in 1589. His woodcut of Goliath, from the biblical story, is above.
It’s also the birthday of Dorothy L Sayers, the crime writer, poet and Christian apologist, who was born today in 1893. She is best known for her crime novels starring Lord Peter Wimsey, a gentleman detective who solves crimes for his own amusement. But she also wrote an apologetics book, Creed or Chaos? which was popular in the 1940s, and gave the last 13 years of her life to translating Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her lively translation, which reproduces Dante’s triple rhyme scheme in English (a major feat), remained in print for 50 years.
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Inferno, Canto I, translated by Dorothy L Sayers
Meanwhile, back to the First Crusade, and the siege of Jerusalem in June 1099. The crusaders had been besieging the strongly defended city for six days when on this day a prophet announced that if the troops abandoned their battering rams, catapults and other siege engines and simply stormed the walls with nothing but faith, the city would fall to them. Against all the odds, it didn’t work.
Today in 1525 Martin Luther admitted defeat in finding husbands for all the former nuns of Wittenberg. Two years after closing the nunnery, one of the sisters, Katharina von Bora, was still not placed, so on this day he married her himself. His ringing endorsement of Katharina would probably have sounded a lot better if he had left off the last few words:
‘I would not exchange Katie for France or for Venice, for God has given her to me, and other women have worse faults.’ Martin Luther
It is the Feast Day of St Anthony of Padua, a 13th-century Franciscan hermit who left his cave one day to sweep a nearby monastery and was persuaded to stand in for the visiting speaker who hadn’t shown up. This was the start of a career as a brilliant international preacher. Huge crowds flocked to hear him, and in Rimini, where he preached on the seashore, a huge congregation of fish listened in. St Anthony is famously the saint you turn to if you have lost something, but he is also the patron saint of almost everything, including horses, amputees, shipwrecks and the runts of litters.
Dear St Anthony please come around,
My glasses are lost and cannot be found.
Popular prayer to St Anthony
Image: Rijksmuseum