21 Facts About Nostradamus

Michel de Nostredame, usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Propheties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.

Nostradamus studied at the University of Avignon, but was forced to leave after just over a year when the university closed due to an outbreak of the plague.

Nostradamus worked as an apothecary for several years before entering the University of Montpellier, hoping to earn a doctorate, but was almost immediately expelled after his work as an apothecary was discovered.

Nostradamus first married in 1531, but his wife and two children died in 1534 during another plague outbreak.

Nostradamus worked against the plague alongside other doctors before remarrying to Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children.

Nostradamus wrote an almanac for 1550 and, as a result of its success, continued writing them for future years as he began working as an astrologer for various wealthy patrons.

Nostradamus suffered from severe gout toward the end of his life, which eventually developed into edema.

Academic sources reject the notion that Nostradamus had any genuine supernatural prophetic abilities and maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's quatrains are the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations.

Nostradamus was one of at least nine children of notary Jaume de Nostredame and Reyniere, granddaughter of Pierre de Saint-Remy who worked as a physician in Saint-Remy.

At the age of 14, Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate.

Nostradamus was expelled shortly afterwards by the student procurator, Guillaume Rondelet, when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes, and had been slandering doctors.

In 1531 Nostradamus was invited by Jules-Cesar Scaliger, a leading Renaissance scholar, to come to Agen.

Nostradamus was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually.

Nostradamus then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today.

Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite evidently thought otherwise.

Nostradamus was buried in the local Franciscan chapel in Salon but re-interred during the French Revolution in the Collegiale Saint-Laurent, where his tomb remains to this day.

Nostradamus often published two or three in a year, entitled either Almanachs, Prognostications or Presages.

Nostradamus was not only a diviner, but a professional healer.

Pepys records in his celebrated diary a legend that, before his death, Nostradamus made the townsfolk swear that his grave would never be disturbed; but that 60 years later his body was exhumed, whereupon a brass plaque was found on his chest correctly stating the date and time when his grave would be opened and cursing the exhumers.

Additionally, scholars have pointed out that almost all English translations of Nostradamus's quatrains are of extremely poor quality: they seem to display little or no knowledge of 16th-century French, are tendentious, and are sometimes intentionally altered in order to make them fit whatever events to which the translator believed they were supposed to refer.

The prophecies retold and expanded by Nostradamus figured largely in popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.