Eugenio Lucas, “Death Reading from a Human Lectern, Congregation in Background” (c. 1850), black chalk and brown wash (courtesy Morgan Library & Museum, purchased by Pierpont Morgan) (all photos by ...

IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own ...