Lycosthenes' Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon

Published by Heinrich Petri, Basle, 1557

Here's the single leaf I got from a book dealer in San Jose. I had no idea what book it came from, but thought I should try to translate it to English. It had been a long time since I had Latin in college, but the passages seemed simple. The breakthrough for me was when I posted to sci.astro in 1992 asking for help in pinning down the comet and eclipse described in the middle of the page. I got some great responses, especially from Graeme Waddington from Oxford who helped me with the translation. Gerhard Brey from Germany pointed me to the textbook (Schove and Fletcher's "Chronology of Eclipses and Comets") which showed that the comet represented here was actually the a.d. 760 visit of Halley's comet. From Schove, I got the full title and author.

 

To assist in translating, I researched the years in question, paying particular attention to identifying the primary sources for those periods. Most of the items on the page appear to have used Theophanes. In particular, the wording describing Halley's comet and the winter of 763 is pretty much lifted directly. My key resource here was "The Chronicle of Theophanes" by Turtledove. The items relating to Pepin and showed up in numerous medieaval history books, but I never got around to identifying Lycosthenes' source here. In particular, I am stumped by the reference to Chilpingus of Averns and Amingus of Pictaviens..

 

Any assistance in improving the translation (or identifying Chilpingus and Amingus) would be greatly appreciated. Email me here.

 

 

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