Everything about Michel De Nostredame totally explained
| occupation =
Apothecary,
author,
translator,
astrological consultant
| known_for =
Prophecy
}}
Michel de Nostredame (
14 December 1503 or
21 December 1503 –
2 July 1566), usually
Latinized to
Nostradamus, was a
French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of
prophecies that have since become famous world-wide. He is best known for his book
Les Propheties, the first edition of which appeared in 1555. Since the publication of this book, which has rarely been out of print since his death, Nostradamus has attracted an enthusiastic following who, along with the popular press, credit him with predicting many major world events.
In contrast, most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's
quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power. Moreover, none of the sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any of Nostradamus's quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance.
Nevertheless, interest in the work of this prominent figure of the
French Renaissance is still considerable, especially in the media and
in popular culture, and the prophecies have in some cases been assimilated to the results of applying the alleged
Bible Code, as well as to other purported prophetic works.
Biography
Childhood
Born on
December 14 1503 (though a date of 21st December is also arguable) in
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of
France, where his claimed birthplace still exists, Michel de Nostredame was one of at least nine children of Reynière de St-Rémy and grain dealer and notary Jaume de Nostredame. The latter's family had originally been
Jewish, but Jaume's father, Guy Gassonet, had converted to
Catholicism in around 1455, taking the Christian name "Pierre" and the surname "Nostredame" (the latter apparently from the
saint's day on which his conversion was solemnized). Michel's known siblings included Delphine, Jehan (c. 1507–77), Pierre, Hector, Louis (born in 1522), Bertrand, Jean and Antoine (born in 1523). — a tradition which is somewhat vitiated by the fact that the latter disappears from the historical record after 1504, when the child was only one year old.
Student years
At the age of fifteen the young Nostredame entered the
University of Avignon to study for his
baccalaureate. After little more than a year (when he'd have studied the regular
Trivium of
grammar,
rhetoric and
logic, rather than the later
Quadrivium of
geometry,
arithmetic,
music and
astronomy/
astrology), he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors in the face of an outbreak of
the plague. In 1529, after some years as an
apothecary, he entered the
University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in
medicine. He was expelled shortly afterwards when it was discovered that he'd been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes. The expulsion document (
BIU Montpellier, Register S 2 folio 87) still exists in the faculty library.
Marriage and healing work
In 1531 Nostredame was invited by
Jules-César Scaliger, a leading
Renaissance scholar, to come to
Agen. In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the
Plague. After their death, he continued to travel, passing through
France and possibly
Italy.
He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly
French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he's most famous today. Feeling vulnerable to religious fanatics, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "
Virgilianized" syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as
Greek,
Italian,
Latin, and
Provençal. For technical reasons connected with their publication in three installments (the publisher of the third and last installment seems to have been unwilling to start it in the middle of a "Century," or book of 100 verses), the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh "Century" have not survived into any extant edition.
The quatrains, published in a book titled
Les Propheties (The Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite thought his quatrains were spiritually inspired prophecies — as, in the light of their post-Biblical sources (see under
Nostradamus's sources below), Nostradamus himself was indeed prone to claim.
Catherine de Médicis, the queen consort of King
Henri II of France, was one of Nostradamus's greatest admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to
Paris to explain them and to draw up horoscopes for her children. At the time, he feared that he'd be beheaded, but by the time of his death in 1566, Catherine had made him Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to the King.
Some accounts of Nostradamus's life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for
heresy by the
Inquisition, but neither
prophecy nor
astrology fell in this bracket, and he'd have been in danger only if he'd practiced
magic to support them. In fact, his relationship with the
Church as a prophet and healer was excellent. His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 came about purely because he'd published his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop, contrary to a recent royal decree.
Final years and death
By 1566, Nostradamus's
gout, which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into
oedema, or
dropsy. In late June he summoned his lawyer to draw up an extensive will bequeathing his property plus 3,444 crowns (around $300,000 US today) — minus a few debts — to his wife pending her remarriage, in trust for her sons pending their twenty-fifth birthdays and her daughters pending their marriages. This was followed by a much shorter codicil. This book had enjoyed considerable success in the 1520s, when it went through half a dozen editions (see
External links below for facsimiles and translations) but didn't sustain its influence, perhaps owing to its mostly Latin text, Gothic script and many difficult abbreviations. Nostradamus was one of the first to re-paraphrase these prophecies in French, which may explain why they're credited to him. It should be noted that modern views of plagiarism didn't apply in the 16th century. Authors frequently copied and paraphrased passages without acknowledgement, especially from the classics.
Further material was gleaned from the
De honesta disciplina of 1504 by
Petrus Crinitus, This may help explain the fact that, during the same period,
The Prophecies reportedly came into use in France as a classroom reader.
Nostradamus's reliance on historical precedent is reflected in the fact that he explicitly rejected the label 'prophet' (for example a person having prophetic powers of his own) on several occasions:
Not that I'd attribute to myself either the name or the role of a prophet — Preface to César, 1555
I do but make bold to predict (not that I guarantee the slightest thing at all), thanks to my researches and the consideration of what judicial Astrology promises me and sometimes gives me to know, principally in the form of warnings, so that folk may know that with which the celestial stars do threaten them. Not that I'm foolish enough to pretend to be a prophet. — Open letter to Privy Councillor (later Chancellor) Birague, 15 June 1566 of his collected Latin correspondence.
Some scholars believe that Nostradamus wrote not to be a prophet, but to comment on events that were happening in his own time, writing in his elusive way — using highly metaphorical and cryptic language — to avoid persecution. This is similar to the Preterist interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Although Halbronn possibly knows more about the texts and associated archives than almost anybody else alive (he helped dig out and research many of them), most other specialists in the field reject this view.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous fairly recent popular books, and thousands of private websites, suggesting not only that the Prophecies are genuine but that Nostradamus was a true prophet. Thanks to the vagaries of interpretation, no two of them agree on exactly what he predicted, whether for our past or for our future. to the events of 9/11: this 'movable feast' aspect appears to be characteristic of the genre.; he'd been buried standing up; and he'd been found, when dug up at the French Revolution, to be wearing a medallion bearing the exact date of his disinterment.
From the 1980s onwards, however, an academic reaction set in, especially in France. The publication in 1983 of Nostradamus's private correspondence and, during succeeding years, of the original editions of 1555 and 1557 discovered by Chomarat and Benazra, together with the unearthing of much original archival material who themselves tend to eschew any attempt at 'interpretation', complained that the English translations were usually of poor quality, seemed to display little or no knowledge of 16th century French, were tendentious and, at worst, were sometimes twisted to fit the events to which they were supposed to refer (or vice versa). None of them, certainly, were based on the original editions: Roberts had based himself on that of 1672, Cheetham and Hogue on the posthumous edition of 1568. Even the relatively respectable Leoni accepted on his page 115 that he'd never seen an original edition, and on earlier pages indicated that much of his biographical material was unsourced.
However, none of this research and criticism was originally known to most of the English-language commentators, by function of the dates when they were writing and, to some extent, of the language it was written in. Hogue, admittedly, was in a position to take advantage of it, but it was only in 2003 that he accepted that some of his earlier biographical material had in fact been 'apocryphal'. Meanwhile the scholars
The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City led to immediate speculation as to whether Nostradamus had predicted the events. Nostradamus enthusiasts pointed to Quatrains VI.97 and I.87 as possible predictions, but the scholars universally discounted these as irrelevant (compare the relevant sections of the Lemesurier and Snopes websites listed under External Links).[Further Information]
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