The Book of Revelation continues to fascinate and frighten Christians in equal measure. In 2017, a self-proclaimed “Christian numerologist” using the pen name “David Meade” claimed that a rogue planet would collide with Earth on September 23, 2017, thereby inaugurating
the End Times; he based his claims, in part, on his reading of Revelation 12 (when the cataclysm failed to occur, he revised his prediction to October 15 and then October 21). The Middle Ages also saw a sustained interest in Revelation, one measure of this being the large number (over 130)
of surviving illuminated manuscripts of Revelation. In Apocalypse Illuminated, Richard Emmerson argues that these manuscript miniatures provided their own exegesis of the text, separate from (but related to) any accompanying commentary.
