Of Brother August Olmstaff himself little need be said, beyond the standard biography proposed by Professor T. P. Lechner in his now famous but hardly seen The Sacred Wound (Cargo Press, 1967). The facts are quickly sketched: Olmstaff was born to a poor farming family in Lancashire, England, in 1455; he was the last and weakest child of nine siblings; he was born mute; his father ordered him to join the local Silent Order of Nazarenes, at the tender age of seven. Like many who joined the monasteries of that time, Olmstaff's subsequent history has vanished into the secret chambers of dust and slow tolling bells. Lechner places his death in the year 1487, in disagreement with more recent writings, which find evidence of Olmstaff's life as late as 1524. (Interested parties are directed to my own 'The Blinded Sundial' in Items of Moral Philosophy, April 1995, for a detailed overview of the 'biography problem'.) It should only be noted here that it was to Lechner's advantage to give Olmstaff an early death, and to point out the (allegedly) curious state of the corpse.

Of the three extant manuscripts attributed to Brother Olmstaff's hand, the first two may be dismissed in passing, being only a fair copy of Plato's Republic, and a rather beautiful illumination of Egberg's On the Chronologic of Certain Insectes. That Plato's philosophies evidently concerned the monk less than the life cycle of the horsefly, has been of interest to some observers.

It was only with the uncovering of the third manuscript in 1959 that the world paid any real attention to the obscure 'tongueless monk of Barnstrop'. How this Latin text found its way from a tiny Lancastrian village to the abandoned library of a household in Dusseldorf has yet to be fully mapped. It was found there by the antiquarian Sir John Bosley, who published his English translation in 1962, the year of his death. This coincidence, of translation and death, has not been overlooked.