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Similar Apocalypse of Pseudo‑Methodius, The Unknown Nostradamus, On the Mysteries of the Egy, Nostradamus: The Illustrated, Les Propheties | ||
The Mirabilis liber (Mirabilis liber qui prophetias revelationesque, necnon res mirandas, preteritas, presentes et futuras, aperte demonstrat...) is an anonymous and formerly very popular compilation of predictions by various Christian saints and divines that was published in France in 1522 (though purportedly published in Rome in 1524, probably because it was the date of an important and long-anticipated planetary alignment) and reprinted several times thereafter. It is not to be confused with the almost contemporary Liber mirabilis. Its unwitting contributors include:
plus, in French, an anonymous anthology including a collection of late 13th-century prophecies elsewhere attributed to ‘Merlin’.
As the above indicates, the book—whose only known complete translation (by Edouard Bricon) was published in French in 1831—had two parts, the first in Latin and the second, shorter, in French. It contained prophecies of fire, plague, famine, floods, earthquakes, droughts, comets, brutal occupations and bloody oppressions. The Church would collapse, the Pope be forced to flee Rome. Such predictions made it extremely popular at the time of the French Revolution, when crowds besieged the French Bibliothèque Nationale to see it. Indeed, many nineteenth-century catalogues suggested that it had predicted the Revolution itself. But above all the book predicted a supposedly imminent Arab invasion of Europe, the advent of the Antichrist and the subsequent End of the World.
The Mirabilis liber seems to have served as a major source for the prophecies of Nostradamus, and was placed on the Lisbon version of the Church's Index of Forbidden Books in 1581.