Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame was born at Saint-Remy-de-Provence in December 1503, into a family of recent converts from Judaism, his grandfather, a grain and money dealer at Avignon, was baptised around 1455-60 and took the name Pierre de Nostredame.

The medical career is less impressive than the legend. He entered the university of Montpellier in 1529 and was expelled: the register survives, and the grounds were that he had worked as an apothecary, a manual trade barred by the statutes, and that he had disparaged physicians. The student procurator who struck him out was Guillaume Rondelet, later a distinguished naturalist. He never held a medical doctorate. He did practise, and his work during plague outbreaks was real and dangerous, but the standard description of him as a qualified physician of the French court overstates the qualification.

The Prophecies began in 1555 at Lyon with 353 quatrains, and grew to nearly a thousand in later editions. Peter Lemesurier's documentary work established how they were made, and the method is not what readers assume. The quatrains are largely retrospective: Nostradamus worked from earlier prophetic compilations, the Mirabilis Liber of 1522 above all, from Livy, Plutarch and collections of portents, and generated future events by comparative horoscopy, matching the planetary configurations of coming years to those of recorded past events and predicting that something similar would recur. The obscurity that permits centuries of reinterpretation is a property of the method rather than a veil over specific foreknowledge.

Nostradamus rejected the label of prophet himself, on the grounds that prophecy proper comes by divine inspiration, and described his work as astrological judgement. His readers have overruled him on that for four hundred and fifty years.

The Centuries were a sideline that outgrew the shop. Nostradamus's working publications were almanacs: yearly pamphlets of weather, harvest and event predictions keyed to the calendar, a crowded and profitable genre in which he published annually from about 1550 until his death, and which made his name long before the Prophecies appeared.

The almanacs sold across France and beyond, were pirated, forged and answered, and drew both his clientele of noble consultants and the scorn of professional astrologers who checked his planetary arithmetic and found it wanting. The first edition of the Prophecies, issued at Lyon in 1555 with three hundred and fifty three quatrains, extended the almanac method past any calendar: undated verses, scrambled in order, dense with classical allusion, place names and ellipsis.

Later editions grew the collection toward a thousand quatrains, some appearing only after his death, and bibliographers still labour over which printings are authentic. The verses' durability is partly engineered: grammatical ambiguity, proper nouns that might be anagrams, and the absence of dates make the quatrains impossible to falsify and endlessly available for retrospective matching, and each European crisis since has duly produced its Nostradamus pamphlets, along with outright fabrications attached to his name. The court took him seriously in his lifetime; Catherine de' Medici summoned him to read her children's horoscopes, and he died comfortable, a bourgeois of Salon, which is not the usual end of prophets.