Friday, October 4, 2013

Wolfgang Lazius, Catalogus aliquot antiquorum Vaticiniorum (1554)

For late medieval and early modern prophecies, Wolfgang Lazius's 1547 Fragmentum vaticinii (VD16 ZV 9507) is an essential sixteenth-century source that seems to collect some passage or other from just about everything that might relate to Austria and the house of Habsburg in some way. (For the Fragmentum, the basic reading is Gerard Jaspers, “Die deutschen Textfragmente in den lateinischen Werken des Wolfgang Lazius,” in In diutscher diute: Festschrift für Anthonÿ van der Lee zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. M. A. van den Broek and Gerard Jaspers, 56–73, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983.) It doesn't seem to be the only such work that Lazius compiled, however. In Johannes Rasch's 1584 Vaticiniorum liber primus (VD16 R 323), Rasch lists both the Fragmentum in the list of works to which he is responding, and another work:
Catalogus aliquot antiquorum Vaticiniorum quibus inclytae Austriae Domus contra mille Satanae ac eius comlicum insidias Victoria fuit praedicta. Wolfg. Lazii. 4. Viennae. 1554. (fol. a3r)
In other words, Rasch claimed to have a 1554 quarto edition printed in Vienna of a work similar but not identical to the Fragmentum vaticinii, which Rasch lists separately. No copy is listed in VD16, but Raimund Duellius included the work in his list of Lazius's works in 1730, so the work seems to have existed at some point.

So I would very much like to see a facsimile of this work, which seems to exist in one copy in Prague:
CATALOGVS ALIQVOT ANTIQVORVM VATICINIORVM, QVIBVS INCLYTAE AVSTRIAE domus contra mille Sathanae, ac eius complicum insidias victoria fuit praedicta = Ain auffmerckung ettlicher gar alter Propheteyen, so vor ettlich vnd hundert Jaren außgangen, vnnd erfunden worden sein Darin des Edln Haus Osterreych bleyblicher, vnnd wider Jedermans maynung löblicher Stand vnd Victoria geweyssagt wird. [s.l.: s.n., po r. 1550]. [31] listů ; 4° (20 cm)

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