A miraculous Renaissance rediscovery - Telegraph Tales are told, too, of cataclysms elsewhere in Europe: the eruption of Vesuvius, and one of the mythical 13th-century children's crusades. A plagues of locusts, Lombardy, 1483, which was followed by a "great dying" of 50,000 people in the region (Taschen) The book's peculiar charm is in the quality of its illustrations. Some are magnificently coloured and composed, using as sources the etchings and woodcuts of artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein the Younger. Others are flat and graphic, with the same placid atmosphere that Auden observed in Bruegel "s The Fall of Icarus, with the "ship that must have seen/Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky," but "Had somewhere to go to and sailed calmly on." In a few pictures the artists seem to have suffered from a sort of miracle fever, piling together unrelated stories in a frenzy: in one example, we see not only Margaretha Weiss von Roth, who survived without food for two years and 12 weeks, but also a wondrous stalk of wheat with 11 ears, and a bunch of grapes that grew a full beard. No one knows who commissioned the book, nor why; the patron may have cultivated a fashionable interest in astrology, hence the proliferation of pictures of comets and celestial signs, or perhaps he was one of the new party of Lutheran believers, gloomily totting up forewarnings of the end of days. A comet that blazed through the sky over Germany and Italy in 1007 (Taschen) The shadowy impressions we have of the book stem partly from the fact that its existence was only known to the world at large six years ago. In 2007, it appeared at a German auction house, and was promptly bought by a London dealer, James Faber. It was Faber who discovered - with the help of Peter Bower, an expert in the recondite field of paper watermarks - that the book dated from the mid-16th century, 100 years earlier than had first been thought. Faber sold it to a private collector a few years later, but Taschen has created a facsimile version, The Book of Miracles, which reproduces not only the paintings and their texts, but even their reverse sides, lightly mildewed. The pictures carry with them the spirit of the times, when people put together puzzling collections of objects in wunderkammern, and were perturbed and impressed by freaks of nature. These images may not hold for us the same holy terror, but they remain beguiling visions, dazzling violations of the natural order. The Book of Miracles (Taschen, RRP £99) is available from Telegraph Books for £65 plus £1.35p&p