FRIAR FUCK-UP INVENTS PRINTING FOR PAPAL PORN

Let me tell you something, children, from the dampest corner of this damp-ass scriptorium. Forget your Gutenbergs and your fancy German bibles. The real story of printing—the one the inquisitors and the suspiciously well-fed Dominicans don't want you to know—starts with a Franciscan, a raging clerical horniness problem, and a truly heroic amount of blasphemy.

His name was Brother Ubertino of Casale, and God's honest truth, the man was pious as the day is long. So pious, in fact, that the sheer, unrelenting hypocrisy of the Papal court in Avignon gave him a spiritual rash you wouldn’t believe. We’re talking about Pope Clement VI, a man whose mistresses were so numerous they had to form a guild and petition for better working hours. Ubertino, bless his impoverished little heart, took to his cell not to pray, but to *write*. He churned out page after page of the most gloriously filthy fan fiction the world has ever seen. We’re talking *The Cardinal-Nephew’s Supple Choirboy*, *Two Legates, One Chalice*… you get the picture. His problem? Hand-copying was slow, and his wrists, unused to that sort of vigorous, repetitive motion, kept cramping up.

One night, after a particularly frustrating session trying to get the shading right on a drawing of the Pope’s—ahem—“sacred sceptre,” Ubertino had a vision. Fueled by cheap wine and righteous fury, he saw the monastery’s wine press and had a moment of pure, divine inspiration. Or maybe it was demonic. The jury's out. He nicked some bits from the clock tower, melted down a pewter plate he *definitely* shouldn’t have had, and cobbled together a creaking, groaning, wood-and-metal contraption. He called it his “Scribal Multiplier.” Its first test run? A 200-copy edition of his magnum opus, *The Curia’s Gaping Maw*, complete with woodcut illustrations that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. The ink was barely dry before pages were being passed around every cloister from here to Brittany, often tucked inside copies of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Of course, the whole thing blew up. Not literally, though Ubertino’s first machine did catch fire twice. The stories spread faster than the clap in a crusader camp. Suddenly, every monk with a secret and a few florins to spare was buying a copy. The Pope was, predictably, furious. Not about the accusation of running a floating bordello on the Rhône—that was just good marketing. No, he was incandescent with rage because, according to a fake eyewitness quote in Chapter Three, he was “a fumbler in the dark, more eager than he was able.” The insult to his virility was unforgivable. He sent inquisitors, but it was too late. The cat was out of the bag, so to speak. Other friars started making their own presses, first for more smut, then for satirical poems, then for critiques of indulgences, and then—well, you know the rest. Some German fella got all the credit a century later for printing a fucking Bible. A *Bible*! Can you imagine anything more vanilla?

As for Ubertino? Nobody knows. Some say the Dominicans caught him and made him spend the rest of his life writing obedient, dreary sermons. I prefer to think he escaped with a comely young novice, changed his name, and opened a print shop in Venice, publishing nothing but illustrated erotic poetry and cookbooks. A man can dream, can’t he? Even in a place this fucking damp.