The prisoner scenario: a though experiment

[Jorge_Stolfi]

 is sentenced to death and she or he offers to create a book of secret foreign knowledge in exchange for saving their life.

Something like that indeed happened to Edward Kelley, companion of John Dee in Prague.  Kelley boasted that he had the recipe to turn metals into gold, and with that got access to the court of Rudolf II.  When he failed to deliver, Rudolf locked him up in a tower and would not let him out until he delivered a recipe that worked.  Look it up...

(Before I got into the VMS, I had no interest at all in Medieval history, which I thought was mostly about feudal lords and kings and battles.  But the story of Dee and Kelley alone is worth wading through all of that.  It is proof of Mark Twain's maxim: "the difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must be believable"...)

All the best, --stolfi