Nostradamus

← Encyclopedia

Nostradamus is the Latinized name of Michel de Nostredame, a French physician and astrologer of the sixteenth century whose collected quatrains, the Prophéties, became the most widely circulated body of prediction in the history of the West. Born in December 1503 at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence into a family of recent converts from Judaism — his grandfather and father had been received into the Church a generation before, and the household kept the educated, mercantile habits of the Provençal converso milieu — he trained in medicine and won a reputation treating plague before turning, in middle age, to almanacs and prognostication. The Latin form of the name first belongs not to the man but to the work: he signed his early almanacs Nostradamus, and the Latin mask, like everything he wrote, sits a little apart from the person it covers.

Portrait of Michel de Nostredame, painted about 1614 by his son César de Nostredame — César de Nostredame, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From physician to almanac-maker

The documented life runs along two tracks that the legend later fused. He studied at Avignon and entered the University of Montpellier hoping for a doctorate, but was expelled when it emerged that he had worked as an apothecary — a manual trade the faculty statutes forbade to its physicians. What survives of his medical career is therefore the career of an itinerant plague-doctor and compounder of remedies across southern France and northern Italy, a man at home among the herbals, the regimens, and the cosmetic and preserve recipes he would later publish in the Traité des fardemens et confitures of 1555. After the death of a first wife and children, he settled about 1547 at Salon-de-Provence, married the widow Anne Ponsarde, and lived out his years in the house that still stands there.

Title page of the Traité des fardements et confitures (Lyon, 1555), the practical compendium of cosmetic and preserve recipes drawn from his years as an itinerant compounder of remedies — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The turn to prophecy was gradual and commercial before it was visionary. From 1550 he issued an annual almanac — the year he first Latinized his name in print — mixing weather, harvest, and political forecast with the year’s astrological configurations, in the established trade of the prognostication. This was a crowded and respectable market. The annual almanac was one of the first mass-printed genres in Europe, and an astrologer who could calculate the year’s eclipses and conjunctions and turn them into readable predictions of dearth, war, and weather had a saleable craft. The almanacs sold; they made his name a brand before the Prophéties made it a legend, and they place him squarely in the working astrological culture of the sixteenth century rather than off to one side of it. Only against that background does the larger book make sense: not a sudden revelation but the ambition of a successful almanac-writer to compose a single prophetic work spanning not one year but, by his own claim, the centuries down to the year 3797.

The converso background matters to that picture without explaining it. Families that had passed from Judaism into the Church a generation or two before Nostradamus often kept a learned, multilingual, mercantile and medical culture, and the household at Saint-Rémy was of that kind; later legend made his grandfathers learned physicians at the court of King René of Provence, a detail the sober record does not confirm. What the background did not make him was a kabbalist or a secret transmitter of Jewish esotericism — there is no trace of Hebrew lore in the Prophéties, whose furniture is Latin-humanist and Christian-apocalyptic throughout. The convert’s inheritance left him an education and a profession, not a hidden doctrine.

The book and its language

The work that carries his name appeared first in 1555, printed at Lyon by Macé Bonhomme, and grew across later editions into a body of roughly a thousand four-line verses — closer, in the surviving text, to 942, since the seventh hundred breaks off unfinished. The quatrains are grouped in sets of a hundred called Centuries: the word counts the verses, not the years, and names a structural unit, a hundred poems, not a span of time. The 1555 edition carried the first centuries and the prose Preface to César, addressed to his infant son; the 1557 Lyon printing extended the sequence; the complete ten centuries, with the long Epistle to Henri II dated June 1558, appeared only in the posthumous edition of 1568.

Title page of Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus (Lyon, 1557), the edition that extended the original sequence of quatrains — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The verse is the heart of the matter. It is written in a dense, allusive French salted with Latin, Provençal, Italian, and Greek, packed with anagram, apocopated and inverted syntax — a Latinate, Virgil-imitating word-order that bends French toward the freedom of classical verse — and with proper names disguised, displaced, or coined. Above all it is almost never dated and almost never fixed to a place that a reader can hold. A quatrain names a city, a beast, a fire, a king brought low, and lets the grammar dissolve before the sense can close. That opacity is the source of both the verses’ endurance and the four-century quarrel over them. Because the lines fix neither time nor sequence, each generation has been able to read its own crisis into them, and almost any reading can be made to fit after the event.

What the method was

Scholarship that has gone behind the legend to the workshop finds a learned compiler rather than a man receiving the future. The single most important modern study of his astrology, Pierre Brind’Amour’s Nostradamus astrophile (1993), and his critical edition of the first centuries (1996), together with the source-tracing of Peter Lemesurier, established that the quatrains are woven largely from existing texts turned into the future tense. The astrological framework is lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from Richard Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps of 1550. The prophetic matter draws on the Mirabilis Liber, the popular compilation of 1522 that gathered the apocalyptic oracles of Pseudo-Methodius, the Tiburtine Sibyl, Joachim of Fiore, and Savonarola — a reservoir of end-time imagery that Nostradamus among the first re-cast into French, which is partly why its scenes came to be credited to him. The historical color is quarried from the classical and medieval historians a sixteenth-century humanist would have on his shelf — Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch, and the chroniclers Villehardouin and Froissart — their wars and prodigies and fallen princes detached from their dates and projected forward. Even the strikingly specific toponyms of certain quatrains have been traced to a road-map, Charles Estienne’s Guide des chemins de France. On this reading the Prophéties are less a window onto coming events than an act of erudite montage: the whole textual inheritance of catastrophe, reset in the future tense and scattered of its anchors so that it could happen again, anywhere.

This is the reading the historians of the period hold. It does not, on its own terms, decide what Nostradamus took himself to be doing — and on that question the prose letters speak in a different register.

The man’s own account

In the Preface to César and the Epistle to Henri II — the two prose frames in which the Prophéties are wrapped — Nostradamus described his foresight as a gift permitted by God, reached not through any commerce with spirits but through nightly study, prayer, and astrological calculation. He took visible pains to set this apart from the divination the Church condemned: he had, he wrote, burned the occult books that might have taught a forbidden art, and what came to him came as an illumination poured into the understanding by divine light, confirmed by the motions of the heavens. The posture is that of the orthodox Renaissance prophet — the seer who does not conjure but receives, and who reads the permitted signatures of the sky — and it keeps him, by his own framing, on the safe side of the line that ran between sanctioned prophecy and the necromancy that could burn a man. Whether this is the self-understanding of a visionary, the prudent cover of an astrologer who knew the Inquisition was near, or the genuine self-image of a learned man who believed his calculations opened onto real foreknowledge, the texts do not finally settle, and the careful reader is left holding all three at once.

Court and contemporaries

What his contemporaries made of him varied as sharply as the later readings would. The 1555 Prophéties and the almanacs brought him to the notice of the crown: in the summer of 1556 he was summoned to Paris, granted an audience by Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici, and set to casting horoscopes for the royal children. Catherine, the most powerful patron of astrologers at the French court, returned to consult him on her royal progress through Salon in 1564, and in that year Charles IX named him Counsellor and Physician-in-Ordinary to the King — a formal honor at the end of a life that had begun under the shadow of the Montpellier expulsion. Others were less persuaded: he was mocked in print as a charlatan trading on fog, denounced from pulpits, and dismissed by sober astrologers as a versifier who had dressed the trade in prophetic costume. He died at Salon in July 1566, of the dropsy he is said to have predicted for himself, and was buried in the local Franciscan church.

An 1846 engraved portrait of Nostradamus, one of the many idealized likenesses produced as his fame grew in later centuries — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He belongs to a generation in which learned astrology, medicine, and the occult arts were braided together and only partly distinguished. The Renaissance synthesis that ran from Marsilio Ficino through Cornelius Agrippa had made the heavens a field of sympathies a learned man might read; Paracelsus, his near-contemporary, was remaking medicine on astrological and alchemical lines in the same decades. Nostradamus drew his physic and his star-craft from that common well, but he is not a magus in the philosophical sense of those figures, nor a system-builder like Giordano Bruno: he left no cosmology, no theory of nature, no method one could be taught. What he shares most exactly is with the practical astrologer-physicians who came after him in the same trade. The English casebooks of Simon Forman and the horary almanacs of William Lilly in the following century, and the star-and-spirit researches of John Dee, belong to the same broad early-modern world of the calculating, prognosticating practitioner who served clients high and low — though Nostradamus alone among them built his fame on undated verse rather than on the dated horoscope, and so escaped the test that a specific forecast invites.

The four-century afterlife

His afterlife outran his life by a wide margin. The quatrains were pressed into service in nearly every later convulsion of European history, and almost always in editions doctored to sharpen the apparent hit — a date slipped in, a name clarified, a line amended to match the event it was now said to have foretold. The Mirabilis Liber he had drawn on was itself placed on a regional Index of forbidden books in 1581, and the Prophéties drifted in and out of suspicion with it. They were read for the religious wars that tore France apart in his own century, for the Revolution and the fate of Louis XVI, and most spectacularly in the Second World War, when the quatrains became an instrument of state. Karl Ernst Krafft, working in the orbit of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, produced interpretations engineered to promise a German victory, and the Reich airdropped Nostradamus leaflets over France and the Low Countries in 1940; British intelligence answered with counter-pamphlets of its own, so that the sixteenth-century verses were quite literally fired in both directions across a twentieth-century front.

Out of this long use grew two readings that have never merged. A durable popular industry — books, broadcasts, and now an unbroken online commentary — treats him as a seer who named figures and catastrophes across the centuries, his book a coded almanac of the future still being decoded line by line as each new disaster arrives. The method of that reading is retrospective: a quatrain is matched to an event after the event, the obscure French is construed toward the known outcome, and the fit is presented as a hit foretold. Historians of the sixteenth century read the same lines from the other end. To them the Prophéties are Renaissance prophecy in the medieval and astrological mold — learned, allusive, deliberately vivid and deliberately vague, of a piece with the apocalyptic compilations, the Joachite end-time tradition, and the prognostication trade of his age — a body of erudite, undatable verse whose openness is its design and not its failure. Both are documented receptions, each with four centuries of practitioners behind it; the popular reading and the historical reading have run side by side since the religious wars without either displacing the other. The verses, saying everything and nothing in particular, continue to admit both.

Scholarship and the textual record

The serious study of Nostradamus is, before it is anything else, a problem of editions: the first printings are rare and corrupt, later editors revised the verses toward whatever had since occurred, and the apparatus of forged and back-dated quatrains began in his own century. The foundational modern work is Pierre Brind’Amour’s critical edition of Les premières centuries from the 1555 Macé Bonhomme text (Geneva: Droz, 1996) and his earlier Nostradamus astrophile (1993), which reconstructed the astrology actually used and exposed the borrowings from Roussat and Petrus Crinitus. Peter Lemesurier’s source-by-source analyses, gathered in Nostradamus, Bibliomancer (2010), trace the quatrains back to the Mirabilis Liber, the classical historians, and the road-maps, arguing that the method was the reworking of inherited texts rather than vision. The earliest English rendering, Theophilus de Garencières’s The True Prophecies or Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus (London, 1672), preserved on EEBO-TCP, shows how quickly the French verse passed into an English commentary tradition that was already supplying its own keys. The documentary baseline against which all of this is measured — the dates, the court records, the editions — is summarized in the standard reference accounts, among them the Encyclopædia Britannica article on Nostradamus. Between the rare 1555 octavo with its unfinished seventh hundred and the gilded prophet of later memory lies four centuries of editorial work, much of it performed on the verses precisely to close the gap the verses were built to keep open.

→ Related: Divination · Esotericism · Middle Ages · Astrology · Prophecy · Renaissance Magic · Apocalypse · Joachimite Apocalypticism · Simon Forman · William Lilly · John Dee · Paracelsus · Marsilio Ficino · Cornelius Agrippa · Giordano Bruno