Biography

Childhood

Student years

At the age of fifteen Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year (when he would 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 again shortly afterwards when it was discovered that he had 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.^[1] However, some of his publishers and correspondents would later call him "Doctor". After his expulsion, Nostradamus continued working, presumably as an apothecary, and became famous for creating a "rose pill" that supposedly protected against the plague.^[6]

Marriage and healing work

In 1531 Nostradamus was invited by Jules-César Scaliger, a leading Renaissance scholar, to come to Agen.^[2] There he married a woman of uncertain name (possibly Henriette d'Encausse), who bore him two children.^[7] In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the Plague. After their death, he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy.^[2]

Seer

After another visit to Italy, Nostradamus began to move away from medicine and towards the occult. Following popular trends, he wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinizing his name from Nostredame to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies,^[8][1] as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on January 1 and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in reaction to the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent persons from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and advice from him, though he generally expected his clients to supply the birth charts on which the horoscopes would be based, contrary to the normal practice of professional astrologers.^[5][3]

Final years and death

Works

Literary sources

Interpretations

The bulk of the quatrains deal with disasters of various sorts (nearly all of them undated). These include plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, battles and many other related events — all of them as foreshadowed by the Mirabilis liber. Some quatrains cover these in overall terms; others concern a single person or small group of persons. Some cover a single town, others several towns in several countries. A major, underlying theme is an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from further east and south headed by the expected Antichrist, directly reflecting the then-current Ottoman invasions and the earlier Saracen (that is, Arab) equivalents, as well as the prior expectations of the Mirabilis liber.^[1] All of this is presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world, a conviction that sparked numerous collections of end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by Christopher Columbus.^[16]

Alternative views

A range of quite different views are to be found in printed literature and on the internet. At one end of the spectrum, there are extreme academic views such as those of Jacques Halbronn (see [2] and [3]), suggesting at great length and with great complexity that Nostradamus' Propheties are antedated forgeries written by later hands with a political axe to grind. 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.

Popular culture

Sources

• Nostradamus, Michel:

Orus Apollo, 1545 (?), unpublished ms; Almanachs, Presages and Pronostications, 1550-1567; Ein Erschrecklich und Wunderbarlich Zeychen..., Nuremberg, 1554; Les Propheties, Lyon, 1555, 1557, 1568; Traite des fardemens et des confitures, 1555, 1556, 1557; Paraphrase de C. Galen sus l'exhortation de Menodote, 1557; Lettre de Maistre Michel Nostradamus, de Salon de Craux en Provence, A la Royne mere du Roy, 1566

• Leroy, Dr Edgar, Nostradamus, ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre, 1972 (the seminal biographical study)
• Dupèbe, Jean, Nostradamus: Lettres inédites, 1983
• Chomarat, Michel, and Laroche, Jean-Paul: Bibliographie Nostradamus (1989)
• Benazra, Robert: Répertoire chronologique nostradamique (1990)
• Randi, James, The Mask of Nostradamus, 1993
• Rollet, Pierre, Nostradamus: Interprétation des hiéroglyphes de Horapollo, 1993
• Brind'Amour, Pierre: Nostradamus astrophile, 1993; Nostradamus. Les premières Centuries ou Prophéties, 1996
• Lemesurier, Peter, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997; The Unknown Nostradamus, 2003; Nostradamus: The Illustrated Prophecies, 2003
• Prévost, Roger, Nostradamus, le mythe et la réalité, 1999
• Chevignard, Bernard, Présages de Nostradamus 1999
• Wilson, Ian, Nostradamus: The Evidence, 2002
• Clébert, Jean-Paul, Prophéties de Nostradamus, 2003
• Gruber, Dr Elmar, Nostradamus: sein Leben, sein Werk und die wahre Bedeutung seiner Prophezeiungen, 2003

External links consistent with the article

Find out more about Nostradamus on Wikipedia