Note: I didn't read the "Renaissance Italy" part of the prompt, and I'm too lazy to go through all the research I did on German stuff and apply it to Italian. Hope you enjoy anyways!

All through the first years of my life, there was only the dirt. It gave my family the crops we needed to live our short, toilsome lives. It coated my hands like a gritty glove; uncomfortable but familiar, it was the sign that I was fulfilling my purpose. And when I lay down to sleep, it held me up, whispering to me that above or below, it would always care for me, that it was me. I never had a reason to question its words.

Six days a week, the same as my brothers who had survived the pox, we were in the fields, tending to the humble potatoes and praying to the Lord God that the blight would not take our field before it could be harvested. Greater rewards awaited us in Heaven, as the priest had foretold, so we welcomed the moment our Lord would decide it was time for our lives to end, be it through pox, blight, sword or storm.

Still, though it was a sin, the fear remained. I felt it. My brothers felt it. Maybe when we became men, we told ourselves, the fear would die, leaving only the work and the faith. Until then, we would pray to be strong.

******

Winter was always a season of transformation. With the harvest gathered, we were apprenticed to trades within the town.

We never knew if we'd be good at the trades we undertook., but like the Lord commanded, we did our work as though we were doing it for God. My two oldest brothers wanted to become blacksmiths, but in the same year, they both set fire to the smithy’s workshop after carelessly misplacing steel. My second-oldest brother did not survive his accident. Two others were apprenticed to the carpenters and the last to the masons, but they too caused more loss of time and coin than their masters were willing to bear. Only my two sisters, who became weavers, were spared from the curse of the Haas family blunders.

It did not disturb me to be given to service at the church. Too weak to work with a hammer and just as clumsy and unfortunate as my brothers, perhaps my mother and father believed that God would make my spirit strong where my body was not.

I found the trivium and quadrivium to be difficult to learn. If it were not for Johann, I would have been destined to be a beggar when I became a man. Johann had been adopted by the monastery as a baby. The bastard son of a fallen squire and a young mother who had died in childbirth, Johann had a talent for understanding that defied his age. He had been uninterested in the chess games or sledding, instead preferring to read the handwritten books kept in the monastery.

In fact, he was the only one in the monastery who could read all of its works. No one knew why, but as the scribes got further into copying their books, they would grow mad, and their hands would begin to shake. This was the result of witchcraft, the abbot had said. Their works became nearly unreadable, and they themselves would become violent, gnashing their blue-black teeth. In time, Johann - just a boy of 9 years like myself - became the sacrist, if not in name.

In exchange for three pots of water from the river daily, Johann would teach me how to understand the jagged lines that made up what he called “letters.” It was a slow effort: both the water and the tutelage. When I learned the letters, he said, I could learn the “words.” I was not as wise as Johann, but he was patient, and he could teach as well as the friars he worked for. All of the elders agreed that he would be the greatest of the Lord’s servants to ever grace Reinfeld.

******

It was before dawn on a Tuesday morning, when Johann pounded on my door. Wearily, I rose from my bed to open up. I suspected that I was to be punished for my slovenly work with the trivium yesterday; it had been difficult, and I had grown discouraged.

“Otto! You must see what I found!” Johann said. There was a thrill in his voice I had never heard before. He grabbed me by the wrist, and we ran down the wooden steps to the library, paying no heed to the loud creaks that would surely rouse the friars from their slumber.

Illuminated by firelight, a book sat open on a table.

"Look at this!" Johann gestured with his hand to the letters on the page.

"It's…a book," I said groggily. I could feel my face sag with exhaustion.

"Yes, but…look!"

What was on the pages was like no writing I had ever seen. The letters, though not as beautiful as those written by the scribes in their early days, were big and legible throughout. Every letter appeared the same throughout, like someone had been given a divine hand to produce perfect symbols. Every line on every page was straight, evenly-spaced, and perfectly inked.

“How?” I said, suddenly wide awake. I had witnessed the skill with which Johann wrote, and even he could not make such precise works.

“I don’t know!” He exclaimed, smiling with wonder, “I’ll ask the prior when he wakes. It was brought to us from St. Mary and St. John. The letter says they have made hundreds like this!”

******

The printing press, it was called. A simple tray with letters carved into blocks, called type, then pressed onto a blank page, became a template full of words that could be applied to a blank page in an instant. In time, we began to make our own from the instructions sent from the St. Mary and St. John friary.

We needed wood, lots of wood. When the stronger friars were sick, I had sometimes been enlisted to help with the axework. It was painful, and before Johann and I had started building the press, I had loathed the task. But in my eagerness to finish our creation, I threw myself into the manual labor, volunteering to join the men on their outings, and even doing it of my own accord when I wanted more than the monastery usually gathered. I grew strong from the furious labor.

And I became precise. We made hundreds and hundreds of blocks, each carefully cut to form dozens of full alphabets. Johann and I would race each other with the hammer and chisel, making page after page after page of type. We became so skilled that eventually, we carved whole passages of scripture onto one block.

I became more like Johann in those days, shunning play and spending every waking hour cutting wood or learning the words which we carved into type. Johann was displeased that I no longer brought him water from the river, but resolved to do it himself, as he did not care for the stuff from the well. It was good enough for me, if not a little bitter, and it was closeby.

*******

Part 2 below...