ABSTRACT
The Vade mecum in tribulacione was fi rst printed to serve Protestant controversialists as documentary evidence of the medieval papacy’s depravity 1 – similar to the Breviloquium de oneribus orbis , which was partially published by Flacius Illyricus as an anonymous text in his 1562 Catalogus testium veritatis . 2 Edward Brown, rector of Sundridge in Kent, a collector and editor of various texts useful to the anti-Catholic cause, invoked Flacius’s partial edition of the Breviloquium to justify his interest in Rupescissa. 3 He edited the Vade mecum in a 1690 supplement to his reprint of the Fasciculus rerum expetendarum et fugiendarum , a 1535 collection critical of the pope. The supplemental volume printed additional texts collected by Brown before the Glorious Revolution to serve his aim of legitimizing the Henrician Reformation against the counterreformation claims of the Catholic King James II. 4
In this supplemental volume, called Appendix, the only prophetic texts are two letters by Rupescissa and his Vade mecum . In his foreword to these texts, Brown
1 This is clear already from the title of the collection, which contains the editio princeps of the Vade mecum : APPENDIX AD FASCICULUM RERUM expetendarum & Fugiendarum, Ab ORTHUINO GRATIO editum COLONIAE AD. MDXXXV SIVE TOMUS SECUNDUS Scriptorum veterum (Quorum pars magna nunc primum è MSS. Codicibus in lucem prodit) qui Ecclesiae Rom. Errores & Abusus detegunt & damnant, necessitatemque REFORMATIONIS urgent. Quorum omnium ratio in Praefatione ad Lectorem, FASCICULO praefi xâ, redditur. Opera & Studio EDWARDI BROWN, Parochi Sundrigiae in agro Cantiano. Londini, Impensis RICHARDI CHISWELL ad insigne Rosae Coronatae in COEMETERIO S. Pauli, MDCXC. Bignami-Odier, Études , 157, n. 6 (157, n. 327), fi rst cites with Fasciculus expetendarum et fugiendarum ( . . . ) the title of the initial volume, which only gives a hint at the second volume. This, however, appeared as a separate volume with its own title, as cited above. In her bibliography, she mixes the beginning of the second volume’s title with the second half of the fi rst volume’s title, cf. ibid., 246 (233).
