Nostradamus: Encyclopedia II - Nostradamus - Biography

Nostradamus - Biography

Born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France in December 1503, Michel de Nostredame was the son of a grain dealer who was also a prosperous home-grown notary. His family was originally Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism during the previous century along with thousands of others, due to increasing official French persecution of Jews, many of whom were the descendants of former refugees from Spain, where they were known as the Marranos. The names of Nostredame's known forebears seem to reflect this. While practice of the ancestral religion was often apparently continued in secret, nobody knows whether this applied to Nostredame's family, or whether it still applied to him two generations later. (It should be noted that the majority of Jews at the time frowned upon such 'cover conversions', not least because succeeding generations of offspring were inevitably more at risk to lose connection with their past, and thus with their roots and religion.) His adult religious leanings suggest, however, that his upbringing was devoutly Catholic.

This apart, nothing is known about his childhood, but at the age of fifteen he entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year he was forced by the plague to leave again. In 1529, after some years as an apothecary, he entered the University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine, but was promptly expelled again when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, which was a 'manual' trade expressly banned by the university statutes. He then continued work as an apothecary (though some of his publishers and correspondents would later call him 'Doctor'), and created a "rose pill" that was widely believed to protect against the the plague.

In 1531 he was invited by Jules-César Scaliger, a leading Renaissance man, to come to Agen. There Nostradamus married a woman whose name is still in dispute (possibly Henriette d'Encausse), but who bore him two children. In 1534, however, his wife and children died, presumably from the plague. After their death he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy.

He settled down in 1547 in Salon-de-Provence, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde Gemelle and eventually had six children – three daughters and three sons. After a further visit to Italy, he began to move away from medicine and towards the occult. He wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinising his name to 'Nostradamus', and was so encouraged by its success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6338 prophecies (most of them, in the event, failed predictions – see Chevignard and Lemesurier (2) under Sources), as well as at least 11 annual calendars, all of them starting on 1st January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. He then began his project of writing 1,000 quatrains, which form the supposed prophecies for which he is famous today. Feeling vulnerable to religious fanatics, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "Virgilianised" syntax, word games and a mixture of languages such as Provençal, Greek, Latin and Italian. For technical reasons connected with their publication in three instalments, the last 58 quatrains of the seventh 'Century', or book of 100 verses, did not survive into any extant edition.

The quatrains, written in a book titled "Les Propheties", 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. Soon nobility were coming from far and wide to receive horoscopes and advice from him, though he normally expected them to supply the birthcharts on which they were based. Catherine de Médicis, the queen consort of King Henri II of France, was one of Nostradamus's admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them, as well as to draw up horoscopes for her royal children. At the time he feared that he would be beheaded, but by the time of his death in 1566, she had made him Counselor and Physician in Ordinary to the King.

By 1566 Nostradamus's gout, which had painfully plagued him for many years and made movement very difficult, finally turned into dropsy. At the beginning of July, after making an extended will and a much shorter codicil, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive by sunrise." The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor between his bed and a makeshift bench.

Some biographical accounts of Nostradamus' life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, but neither prophecy nor astrology fell under this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practised magic to support them. In fact, his relations with the Church as a prophet and healer were always excellent. His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 came about purely because he had published his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop, contrary to a recent royal decree.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Biography", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki