Early Life
Nostradamus was born Michel Notredame (or Nostredame, the Provençal spelling) near the end of 1503 in St. Rémy de Provence in southern France. Although he would later claim that his father and grandfather were physicians, it appears more likely that they were in fact prosperous grain merchants. What is certain is that the family had recently converted from Judaism to Christianity and dropped its original name in order to remain in Catholic France.
The young Michel received his earliest education from his grandfathers, who found him a promising student. He was then able to continue his studies at two nearby cities renowned for their intellectual and cultural life, Avignon and Montpellier. Michel began secondary school at the former in 1517, where the prescribed course of study included grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, mathematics, and astronomy (which encompassed astrology as well). At the time, Avignon was under direct control of the Catholic Church; there, as in all seats of learning, classes were taught in Latin.
Michel went on to study medicine at the University of Montpellier in 1522, where once again astrology played a role alongside such subjects as anatomy and surgery. Tradition has it that he concentrated upon pharmacology and various methods of treating the plague. When he was graduated in 1525 at the age of twenty-two, he followed the custom of signaling his accomplishment by Latinizing his last name, thus adopting the form by which he is best known today.
Life’s Work
Nostradamus (as he would henceforth be known) was now fully qualified to practice medicine, and did so for several years, but he undertook further study and teaching at the University of Montpellier, from which he received an advanced medical degree. He eventually apprenticed himself to eminent physician and scholar Jules-César Scaliger of Agen in 1532. Soon afterward he married, and the couple bore two children.
However, Nostradamus’ family were to die of the plague in 1537 while he was traveling to treat other victims. He subsequently quarreled with the notoriously irascible Scaliger and was accused of making heretical remarks, events that were to lead to his quitting Agen. After ten more years of travel, practice, and teaching in France and Italy, Nostradamus met and married Anna Ponce Gemelle of Salon de Provence, a town not far from his birthplace. The couple eventually produced six children.
Nostradamus began compiling astrological almanacs—popular and highly salable publications—in 1550. He followed with two collections of medical and cosmetic formulas in 1552, Traicté des fardemens and Vray et parfaict embellissement de la face. These were combined in 1555 as Excellent et moult utile Opuscule à touts necessaire qui desirent auoir cognoissance de plusiers exquises Receptes (“excellent and very useful treatise necessary for all those who desire to have knowledge of several exquisite recipes”). Nostradamus also published Orus Apollo, fils de Osiris, roi de Ægipte niliacque (“the book of Orus Apollo, son of Osiris, king of Egypt”), a collection of maxims of dubious origin. More important was his translation from Galen, the classical Greek physician, Paraphrase de C. Galen sur l’exortation de Menodote, in 1557. This translation was criticized as inaccurate, although Nostradamus may have been working from an imperfect manuscript.
Nostradamus’ most famous works, however, were his Centuries, originally published in French as Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus , a series of ambiguously worded prophecies. Unlike his almanacs, which forecast events one year at a time, these new works predicted events to the year 3797, although in no particular order. The first three series appeared in 1555; by 1558, seven more had been published, although their exact dates are not certain. Referred to...
(This entire section contains 976 words.)
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as “centuries” because each ostensibly included one hundred verses, their total actually comes to somewhat less than one thousand. A complete collection seems to have been published in 1558, but no copies of this edition are known to survive.
Cast in quatrains ( stanzas of four lines), the Centuries are notoriously obscure. They mix local allusions, references to France’s unsettled political situation, and generalized predictions of disasters and calamities—as cynics have noted, always a safe bet. Although claims have been made for Nostradamus’ skills as a poet, his work is oddly punctuated and his grammar and syntax wayward. It has never been clearly established what Nostradamus intended to express in these writings, nor whether profit was his motive in publishing them.
Public reaction to the Centuries varied, with the wide range of responses illustrating the intellectual and social ferment of the times. Wealthier (and arguably vainer) readers found the verses’ daunting obscurity both a compliment and a challenge to their erudition. The masses, on the other hand, seem to have disliked and distrusted Nostradamus, partly because of his growing wealth and partly because of his presumed league with supernatural powers. Two other groups openly ridiculed him: those who dismissed astrology as nonsense and, ironically enough, astrologers themselves, who protested that the astrological content of the Centuries was defective. Despite—or, more likely, because of—such opposition, Nostradamus’ works sold well and were routinely reprinted and pirated.
In any case, Nostradamus’ fame spread quickly, and he soon found an important and suitably superstitious reader in the French court. So impressed was Catherine de Médicis, the queen of France, that she invited Nostradamus to Paris. He subsequently visited the city in mid-1556 (a trip of a month in those days) and was asked by the queen to cast the horoscopes of her sons. He seems to have remarked in guarded terms that her sons would be kings—a prediction both gratifying and not, after all, unlikely—and returned to Salon more famous still. When the French court visited southern France nearly a decade later, they made a point of visiting Nostradamus and bestowing official honors upon him.
Throughout the latter part of his life, Nostradamus seems to have increased his income by money-lending, which in at least one instance had long-lasting consequences. Approached by an entrepreneur anxious to link the Rhône and Durance rivers with a canal and thus irrigate the surrounding region, Nostradamus helped finance the project, which was completed in 1559.
Nostradamus has routinely been portrayed as both an astrologer and an orthodox Catholic, roles not regarded as necessarily contradictory during his lifetime. However, a cache of letters discovered by scholar Jean Dupèbe has revealed that Nostradamus’ sympathies were Protestant—a fact that could easily have led to his execution in passionately Catholic France had the letters fallen into the wrong hands.
Nostradamus was described in his prime by an apprentice as being slightly shorter and stockier than average, heavily bearded, energetic, and short-tempered. The same source praised his quick intelligence, keen memory, and outstanding generosity, although the ascription of such qualities may strike modern readers as being somewhat generalized and formulaic. He is traditionally pictured wearing the four-cornered cap typical of a medical doctor of his time.
Nostradamus suffered from arthritis, gout, and dropsy toward the end of his life, and by 1566 was confined to his house, where he died in early July. One of his predictions had suggested that his body would be found near his bed and bench. Nostradamus had placed a bench in such a way as to help himself into bed, and he was indeed found sprawled near or upon it after death—another example of a prophecy both tantalizingly suggestive and yet far from unlikely.
