What price can you pay to gain secret knowledge? To be known as a great necromancer, an all-knowing wizard? Are you ready to give your soul to the devil in order to tell fortunes using the verses of the immortal “Aeneid”? If you don’t yet know the answers to these questions, then the lives of Virgil and Roger Bacon will teach you a lot. The talent and originality of historical characters often leads to the fact that their lives are surrounded by the most incredible legends. The extravagant behavior of people like Brother Rush and Robert the Devil makes it even more convincing that such a person could make friends with evil spirits. This book contains for the first time translations of prose novels published at the dawn of European printing. The reader gets acquainted with the biographies of the famous predecessors of Doctor Faustus: the Franciscan Roger Bacon, the poet Virgil, who gained fame as a famous sorcerer and sorcerer, the malicious Robert the Devil and the simple-minded brother Rush, accustomed to making fun of everyone. Deep knowledge and extraordinary skills do not bring peace and happiness to the heroes of novels, but perhaps the adventurous life of the inventors of glasses and builders of invisible walls is much more interesting than dull decency.