Chapter 5

The Nostradamian Underworld

Death could have marked the end of the story. It certainly did for other prognosticators and soothsayers. Besides historians, how many among us have heard of Guillaume de La Perrière, Simon Forman, or Joseph Grünpeck? All faded from view at some point after their passing. This did not happen to Michel de Nostredame.

Take Paris around 1610. The astrologer had been dead for five decades, and yet bookstalls carried innumerable publications bearing his name. There were pricey editions of the Prophecies and cheaper ones on flimsy paper. In public markets as well as in elegant residences, people looked up his predictions before princely marriages, during military expeditions, or after the deaths of prominent marshals. Around the main court of justice, striking lawyers denounced a magistrate’s new regulations by quoting a quatrain predicting his defeat. On the Pont Neuf, the new stone bridge that teemed with comedians and tooth-pullers, hawkers sold songs about Nostradamus.

Some of these songs and predictions announced the assassination of King Henri IV. The French monarch had acceded to the throne in 1589, abjured Protestantism, and promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which ended the Wars of Religion by allowing Protestants and Catholics to live together in peace. But the monarch still had plenty of enemies. He survived several assassination attempts, and rumors of his death were rife. Nostradamian quatrains predicting his demise had circulated at the French court and elsewhere for years. One of them (a fake) seemed to announce something momentous for the “Great Celtic Lion” in his fifty-seventh year, which fell in 1610. As fate had it, a rabid Catholic stabbed the king to death that spring. A few contemporaries rejoiced, a few sought revenge, but most were in shock. In Paris, women cried and pulled their hair and prayed for the new king. Men took refuge in their homes or else grabbed swords and ran wildly in the streets while spewing profanities. The civil wars were about to resume! The final days had descended upon France! People turned to predictions, numerology, and Nostradamus, whose prophecies disclosed “all that is new in the world,” as one chronicler put it. It was said that quatrain 7.17 had announced the king’s untimely death:

For some, this was just too much. “There are many hollow brains, and minds fit only to receive anything that is extravagant,” wrote the scholar Gabriel Naudé. “[They] think their pockets empty without these Centuries, which they idolize.” But the appeal of theProphecies could not be denied.¹

Nostredame stood out. While his competitors held one or two pieces of the puzzle across the sixteenth century, he alone seemed to own the full set. La Perrière’s Considerations on the Four Worlds (1552) provided four centuries of quatrains on the divine, angelic, celestial, and sensible realms but said nothing about the present world or the future. In England, Forman and John Dee grew famous as astrologers, yet neither one published much. Forman opened a successful horoscope practice but lacked medical credibility and ties to the court. Dee penned political predictions but his geometrical language required technical know-how. He also had the misfortune of landing in jail on charges of necromancy. In Italy, Girolamo Cardano understood the new media culture but did not fashion a poetic universe. In the Holy Roman Empire, finally, the humanist Grünpeck coupled astrology and eschatological prognostication but also interpreted biblical prophecies and glorified Emperor Maximilian I. As a court chaplain and the emperor’s personal secretary, he linked his name to a specific religious tradition and a political party.²

The tantalizing but controversial Nostredame, however, roamed freely. Granted, he came across as a Catholic astrologer with ties to the court. One prominent royal biographer credited him with having told Catherine de Médicis that her three oldest sons would accede to the throne (which they did), and that the middle one, Charles IX, would rival Charlemagne. But Nostredame had not been a royal or papal propagandist. He had not hammered his ideological views and moral precepts into the minds of readers. Nor had he directed his Prophecies toward a single party or cause, or even Catholic circles alone. In the wake of his death, therefore, no religion, sect, or political faction affiliated itself with Nostradamus. None took it upon itself to maintain or disseminate the quatrains. They could easily have faded into oblivion, but Nostradamus did not vanish. Instead of belonging to no one, the quatrains belonged to everyone, opening themselves to people from various backgrounds and religions.³

Among them was a string of editors, compilers, interpreters, translators, forgers, and hacks—we might call them Nostradamian providers. “Nostradamus is a planet,” a literary critic noted in 1834. “He has his satellites, and he acquires new ones as he advances in space and time.” The metaphor is well-chosen. The phenomenon has indeed been a planetary system, filled with satellites that both reflect and intensify the radiance of the main celestial body. The people who orbit Nostradamus form neither a subculture nor a counterculture, with distinctive or subversive values. There was no harmonious community here, no consensus. Instead, ambitious, fiercely independent, freewheeling individuals have inhabited a cultural underworld that endures across time and space, just below the surface. They have embraced Nostradamus for different reasons. Sometimes, it is to imbue their world with meaning, sometimes it is to advance particular agendas, sometimes it is to improve their own lot, and sometimes it is a mix. Regardless, they have kept Nostradamus’s name alight in the predictive firmament and given it different hues. Cultural transmission and cultural transformation go hand in hand.⁴

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The first and brightest satellite was Nostredame’s personal secretary, the man who reportedly bid him good night on the eve of his death. The son of a Burgundian gunsmith, Jean de Chevigny had apparently studied medicine and law before devoting himself to poetry and higher mysteries. He began corresponding with Nostredame as a young man and visited him in Salon in 1560. The astrologer calculated his horoscope and his brother’s as well. Within a year, Chevigny was living in Salon and assisting Nostredame with his correspondence and paperwork. When an opportunity presented itself to work for the governor of Avignon in 1563, Chevigny demurred. He enjoyed his quiet but rewarding intellectual life alongside the man he once called “High Priest of Sun and Moon.” Following Nostredame’s death, he moved to Grenoble, composed poems, and worked on a history of the French Wars of Religion. He also spent years poring over his master’s writings. In 1594, he published the first major book about Nostradamus: The First Face of the French Janus.⁵

There is a wrinkle to this story: the book’s author was one Jean-Aimé de Chavigny. Most contemporaries believed that Chevigny had simply changed surnames. He may have discarded a name that smacked of lower origins, or added Aimé—the adored one—after falling in love. But some claimed that Chevigny and Chavigny were different individuals. Chavigny, a young man from eastern France, came upon the scene around 1580, after Chevigny’s death, and claimed to be Nostredame’s disciple. Either he had never met Chevigny, or else the older man took the younger one under his wing without imagining that he would usurp his identity. Some scholars have devoted years to this matter. The problem is that, without direct evidence, we are left with circumstantial arguments and two hypotheses that seem equally plausible and inconclusive. At any rate, the controversy endowed the phenomenon with another coat of mystery. Commentators could now debate not only what the predictions meant but also who this first provider really was. All of this bolstered the notion that, when it comes to Nostradamus, strange happenings rarely lag behind.⁶

Something else matters: a man whom we might as well call Chavigny became Nostradamus’s leading booster. He took it upon himself to transmit his divine pronouncements and protect his legacy. Chavigny, who claimed to have collected all of his master’s publications after his death, put together a manuscript of 6,338 numbered portents. Such is the genesis of his French Janus, which included a selection of portents drawn from Nostradamus’s almanacs and of quatrains from the Prophecies. The original almanacs were hard to find after Nostredame’s death, but the Prophecies grew increasingly popular. Publishers from Lyon, Paris, and Amsterdam had released close to a hundred French-language editions by 1700, many in small portable sizes. Sales numbers are elusive, but a French judge noted the book’s incredible success in the 1620s. Outside France, however, this long, cryptic work discouraged translators. The first translation of quatrains from the Prophecies (a selection) seems to have occurred in Barcelona in 1641. I have located only one full translation of the book at this time. It came out in London in 1672, the work of one Theophilus de Garencières, a French-born apothecary who sought to deepen reverence for God by helping readers relate current events to Providence. Italian, German, and Dutch readers could consult either French editions of the Prophecies (plenty of educated people had the required linguistic skills) or translations of selected verses.⁷

Chavigny did not seek exhaustiveness. The man who knew Nostradamus better than anyone else felt entitled to select 267 key predictions and then reorder them, with utter disregard for his master’s original plan. The Nostradamian provider was first of all an editor and a conveyor. He altered words to improve rhymes, eliminated references to specific months, and inserted exclamation marks. Chavigny’s book was not static, and neither were other seventeenth-century editions of Nostradamus. Some of the changes made in those editions seem accidental. An f became an s; a y became an i. Volant (flying or stealing) became voiant (seeing). “Le né sans fin” (the born without end) became “le né sang fin” (the born blood end, or the born blood thin). Other changes, in contrast, were deliberate. To entice readers, publishers wrote their own subtitles—for instance, The Marvelous Predictions of Master Michael Nostradamus or The True Centuries and Prophecies. Like Chavigny, they also added prefaces and indexes and versions of a biographical sketch that first appeared in the French Janus. This “Brief Discourse on the Life of M. Michel de Nostredame” owed as much to hagiographies of saints as to Plutarch’s Lives and Nostredame’s own persona. Here was the wise, hardworking humanist who slept only five hours a night. Here was the luminous prognosticator who devoted himself to public welfare. Here was the devout Catholic who abhorred vice. Chavigny’s Nostradamus was a legitimate soothsayer, a moral guide, and a patriotic, devoted subject of the Gallic Crown.⁸

But there was a major change of inflexion. Nostradamus now came across as a self-proclaimed, unabashed prophet. This was a far cry from the man’s attachment to astrology and his caution regarding prophetic matters. Chavigny placated theologians by defining prophets as prognosticators rather than unerring visionaries, but his convictions were plain. A benevolent God had tapped the virtuous Nostradamus to convey His will and warn of tribulations and scourges ahead. By quoting quatrains alongside Deuteronomy, Chavigny placed this seer within a Christian vatic tradition. His French Janus inaugurated a long-lasting depiction of Nostredame as an elect oracle who, like Isaiah, received supernatural impressions and disclosed divine mysteries. A French historian remarked in 1646 that Nostradamus was now seen as an incomparable prophet, an extraordinary genius, a mind full of profound reflections. By tapping the country’s prophetic enthusiasm, these providers recast Nostradamus and opened up new readings of the quatrains.⁹

Some providers went further yet and assumed his voice or name. This was especially true in almanacs, which remained the leading medium in Western Europe. It was common for households to own only two publications: almanacs and a Bible. Even though Nostredame’s own almanacs had vanished, new ones continued to use his name and predictions. It is in these publications that most ordinary Europeans encountered Nostradamus between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. To succeed in the almanac market, publishers needed an imposing author, a “doctor in physyck and astronomie” who would make their publication seem ancient and reputable. If they could not hire such an author, they simply invented one. There are traces of thirty such authors in France, the most popular being Matthieu Laensberg and Nostradamus. According to one memoirist, no almanac could succeed without sporting the name of Nostradamus. Some publishers simply picked a few of the quatrains and claimed that they pertained to the years to come. In 1799, for instance, a Swiss almanac presented seven successive quatrains of the ninth centurie as predictions for the years 1800–1806. This happened again and again. Other publishers flat-out copied Nostredame’s almanacs, or combined material from his various publications. Counterfeit ones had surfaced across the continent for decades and continued to do so. In some cases, publishers simply married Nostradamus’s name with content that had nothing to do with him. There was a thin line between counterfeiting, forgery, and outright invention.¹⁰

Some readers did not care who had penned their almanacs. An English diplomat received one that was attributed to Nostradamus, assumed that it was written by some monk, but shared it with an ambassador anyway. Others, however, wanted the original. In 1563, the French diplomat Hubert Languet had sent a friend a Nostradamus almanac that he had received from an acquaintance. But he added a caveat: “I think it has been falsified and fabricated by a greedy printer.” Hans Rosenberger, too, had told Nostredame that he hesitated to order his almanacs from Lyon because of local forgers. Aware of this problem, Nostredame had certified in some almanacs that he was their true author. Elsewhere, he warned readers that, without his handwritten dedication, the publication that they held was the work of counterfeiters from Paris, Avignon, or Toulouse.¹¹

Chavigny was neither a forger nor a counterfeiter, but his French Janus included several new quatrains. He claimed that they came from eleventh and twelfth centuries that had until now remained hidden. These fake centuries entered many editions of theProphecies, including Theophilus de Garencières’s translation. Some publishers slipped in other new quatrains surreptitiously while others drew attention to their new find. In the 1620s, for instance, editors of the Prophecies quietly inserted two quatrains at the end of the seventh centurie. Throughout the seventeenth century, people hence pondered and discussed predictions that, unbeknownst to them, had been forged to illuminate current events. The much-discussed verse about the “impetuous effort” (Henri IV) defeating “La Tour” (lord Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne) in 1606? The two quatrains about the 1627 siege of La Rochelle (“three times seven plus six”) by the forces of Louis XIII (“seven and six”)? All of them fakes.¹²

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The most significant addition to the Nostradamian corpus occurred around 1605, when editions of the Prophecies began to include fifty-eight six-line poems known as sixains. This is another mystifying story, involving a doctor and flour merchant named Vincent Seve. This devout man, a resident of Beaucaire in southwestern France, reportedly lived in a hidden cell within an abandoned quarry. He devoted his days to his two passions: the history of his native town and astrology. Seve claimed that, on the eve of his death, a nephew of Nostredame named Henry had entrusted him with his uncle’s unpublished sixains. He kept quiet for a while but decided to make the sixains public upon realizing that they related to present happenings. It was his duty as a faithful subject to inform Henri IV of what awaited France in the new century. By the end of the year, the sixains had entered many editions of the Prophecies under the title of Admirable Predictions for the Current Years of This Century.¹³

Much of what we know about Seve comes from his own introduction to the sixains. I have uncovered no trace of a nephew named Henry, no record of a royal audience around 1605, no documents explaining how the sixains made it into print. While the sixains shared the quatrains’ predilection for metaphors and place-names, they contain more complete sentences, dates, and references to events set in the early seventeenth century. All of this made them easier to decipher. They are also more sanguine than the quatrains and praise Henri IV’s Bourbon dynasty (which acceded to the French throne after Nostredame’s death) in ways that the quatrains never did. Everything suggests that the sixains were forgeries. Seve insisted, however, that they were authentic—Nostredame had simply written them with unusual clarity—and many contemporaries believed him. Pamphleteers depicted the sixains as another lost centurie, or else claimed that they completed the forty-two quatrains of the fourth centurie. In the 1690s, an aristocrat from Avignon was certain that Nostredame had composed these predictions shortly before dying—as a parting comment on the seventeenth century. The allure of the mysterious Nostredame, the appetite for anything odd or rare, and the loose conditions of publishing set the stage for yet another transformation of the entity known as Nostradamus.¹⁴

And what about this strange nephew? Nostredame had vowed never to teach his craft to his children. There were just too many ill-intentioned astrologers—and, no doubt, easier paths of social mobility. He apparently kept this promise since none of his six offspring followed in his footsteps. César was a poet, a painter, a historian, and a mayor of Salon; one of the other boys became an officer, the other one a monk; and we know little about the three girls. And yet all kinds of relatives and descendants were soon publishing predictions under Nostradamus’s aegis. We know nothing about them, not even if there were actual people behind these pen names. But all believed that the Nostradamus patronymic would play in their favor. “I don’t know who he is,” Nostredame’s (real) brother Jean wrote about one of these spurious relatives in 1570. “On my life and my honor, I swear that he borrows Nostredame’s surname to grant his banter more authority.” This happened to other renowned astrologers, but the famous Nostradamus drew once again more than his share. This is why, a century later, a polemicist could mock an astrologer as an “ancestor to the 2,480th degree of the ancestor fourth removed, on his mother’s side, of Michael Nostradamus.” Impostors joined the ranks of the Nostradamian providers.¹⁵

First up was Mi. de Nostradamus, an enigmatic figure who kept his relationship to Nostredame vague while writing prognostications in the 1560s and 1570s. Next came Michel Nostradamus the Younger, an author who claimed to be his son and published several prognostications (some of them with Nostredame’s own publisher, Benoît Rigaud). This doctor had supposedly found portents in his father’s study after his death, an improbable claim given that he could not have been older than thirteen when Nostredame published his first predictions. Official records bear no traces of him, and yet many believed in his existence in early modern Europe. By the early 1600s, a tall tale held that the younger Michel had been caught lighting a fire in the town of Pouzin in order to confirm Nostredame’s prediction that it would burn down. A lord summoned him and asked whether he expected to suffer a misfortune. When he replied that he did not, the lord startled a horse, which kicked the deceitful soothsayer in the stomach and proved that he was a fraud.¹⁶

No tragic fate seems to have befallen the last two supposed relatives who came onto the scene in the late sixteenth century. The nephew Philip or Filippo Nostradamus wrote in prose and found publishers in England and Italy. Antoine Crespin dit Nostradamus—who claimed to be lord of Hauteville and a doctor from Marseille—opted for verse. Instead of composing his own predictions, however, he fashioned quatrains by cutting and pasting random lines from the Prophecies. This familial connection retained a purchase on the public imagination during the centuries that followed. A phony grandson published pamphlets in Paris in 1649; the author of a French Catholic almanac claimed to belong to the Nostradamus lineage in 1828. No doubt there were still others, all of them promising an intimate encounter with a man and an inspiration that seemed increasingly distant and yet very much part of their own world.¹⁷

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What, however, had Nostredame meant to say? The question was as urgent as ever after his death, and Chavigny did not elude it. If Nostredame was a prophet, then someone had to interpret his mysterious pronouncements. Chavigny realized that some of the quatrains did not match up with actual events and that some of the predictions had apparently not come true. One of them depicted 1555 as a safe year for the pope, and yet Julius III died that March. Chavigny did not conclude that the prophet had erred or uttered meaningless words. Instead, he accepted the claim that he had concealed his true message to protect himself as well as the populace. Ordinary people naturally struggled to decipher the quatrains, but Chavigny insisted that “a good speculator and interpreter” could uncover their hidden meaning. The Nostradamian provider, he said, was a hunting dog who would lead his masters—the readers—to their prey.¹⁸

But even a hunting dog needs to earn the trust of his masters. Chavigny’s authority rested on three foundations. To begin, his close acquaintance with Nostredame had granted him unparalleled insights. Direct evidence after all carried considerable weight at this time. Tales about monstrous births and other extraordinary happenings often rested on eyewitness accounts. Having worked with Nostredame and taken care of him during his last days, Chavigny could claim quasi-familial familiarity with the man and his mind. Second, he had devoted considerable energy to studying, unraveling, and collating predictions that few people could truly understand. No one knew more about prophecy and history; no one read the quatrains more patiently; no one worked harder at linking past events with future ones. Like Nostredame, finally, Chavigny committed himself to helping others and serving his kingdom by sharing a text that had been lost. As a witness, a learned scholar with unimpeachable work habits, and a man of virtue, Chavigny was a legitimate and irreplaceable go-between.¹⁹

Readers of the French Janus hence follow an interpreter who, like a practiced guide wielding his machete, leads his party across a thick semantic jungle. Chavigny surrounded each quatrain with copious annotations. Moving from one line to the next, he clarified anagrams and disentangled symbols. Augé, he explained, meant both escalation and ruin in one quatrain. The lion and the barking dog in another quatrain symbolized Henri IV and his enemy. Elsewhere, the terrestrial and sea legate designated a royal ambassador to the Council of Trent. When Nostredame wrote that “Germany shall see the birth of diverse sects / Quite like the paganism of ancient times” (3.76), he was expressing his displeasure with Protestants. Chavigny showed readers where Nostredame had inserted nonsensical quatrains to conceal the meaning of others and where he had written one date but really meant another. Nostredame had invented the game, but it fell upon Chavigny to set the rules. This he did with utter confidence.²⁰

Chavigny launched something big. From now on, the Nostradamus phenomenon would revolve more and more around a dyad: the mystifying words and the experts who had the qualifications to clarify their meaning. A cottage industry of interpreters came into being. In 1620, to mention but one, an anonymous Small Essay or Commentary on the Centuries of Master Michel Nostradamus arranged forty quatrains into a story about the five preceding decades in French history. Like Chavigny, and nearly all of the interpreters who have surfaced since, the author picked freely from the centuries. Nostredame had never claimed that the quatrains depicted events in chronological order, so why not jump from one to another? The Small Essay showed readers that even the most chaotic events had a structure. Someone had seen it coming and someone could now figure it all out. Readers simply needed help. Publishers of the Prophecies obliged in the late seventeenth century. Editions now included introductions to Nostredame’s anagrams, metaphors, and punctuation. They might explain his use of infinitives or point out that saigne, as he used the word, meant marshes as well as castration. One Amsterdam publisher promised that, with his crib sheet in hand, readers would see “clearly what our Prophet had hidden from us in obscure terms.” They would grasp what had until then been unknown or poorly understood about the most remarkable events of their times.²¹

The interpreters who came after Chavigny could not claim a direct acquaintance with Nostredame, and most felt uncomfortable inventing a familial connection. Instead, many of them claimed to own the irrefutable key to the Prophecies. Some pointed toward their natural intuition and divine gifts. After a century of confusion, said the translator Garencières, God had summoned a person of “peculiar Genius”—none other than himself—to clarify the meaning of the quatrains. Others emphasized their command of astrology or political affairs. In 1710, a Normandy priest named Jean Le Roux declared that no one had yet fathomed Nostredame’s peculiar mode of expression. Imagination had led rival interpreters astray. Le Roux’s close philological study revealed, however, that Nostredame had mixed Latin grammar with French sentence structure. Grounded in meticulous study and a commitment to order and clarity (rational tenets that were central to the early Enlightenment), this insight enabled Le Roux to decode the quatrains. By the eighteenth century, many providers summoned numerology or cartomancy (the study of playing cards) while probing quatrains and professing, like Chavigny, to uncover a man whom no one else could fathom.²²

Like Chavigny as well, many Nostradamian providers entertained grand designs. Chavigny was convinced that Nostradamus had offered meaningful depictions of the cosmos and an eventful period in French history. His pronouncements on the “century’s corruption” convey a vision of the world in which subterraneous forces, recurring cycles, magical powers, and astral conjunctions came together in mysterious yet indisputable ways. By reorganizing quatrains in a sequence of his own making, he looked backward as well as forward, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, who beheld the past and the future. “The defining trait of prediction,” he explained, “is not only to receive future events, but also to relate present and past ones.” Chavigny began with history, whose edifying examples made it possible to distinguish good and evil, and asked readers to behold Nostredame’s ability to depict the forces shaping European politics. Most of the French Janus pertained to the years 1555–1589, a period that ended with the Bourbons’ ascent to the French throne. The French Wars of Religion loomed large in this chronology, along with schisms and peace treaties, negotiations and sieges. Chavigny was more cautious about future events, though he did see the end of times approaching.²³

More than revelations, the French Janus hence provided confirmation of past events, drawing readers beneath the surface of things while painting a tableau of wondrous happenings. Some of the Nostradamian providers who followed tried their hand at forecasting during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but most of them were equally prudent. Prediction was less prevalent than a safer, more meaningful framework that fused Europe’s past, present, and future. This outlook would long prevail.

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Nostradamian providers did not only entertain lofty aspirations. By choice or circumstances, many of them plotted their course across the marketplace. Economic crises, censorship, and the decline of fairs hurt the publishing business during the seventeenth century, but the number of publications—especially for those in modern languages and small formats—continued to climb. The Nostradamus phenomenon retained the allure it had acquired during the Renaissance. Publishers were drawn to a trove of predictions that, like ephemeral media, spoke about the lives, hopes, and anxieties of readers high and low. The quatrains could always yield something different and hence feed a public hunger for novelty. New editions, selections, adaptations, and interpretations of theProphecies could by now tap a tradition that went back decades or even a century and yet still seemed fresh and relevant. The quatrains also lent themselves admirably to different economies of publishing, sliding from almanacs and chapbooks to pamphlets, engravings, and books. Easy to adapt to new circumstances, easy to reinvent, repackage, and recycle again and again, Nostradamus continued to tap key dimensions of the era’s media culture.²⁴

Some years, two or three publishers would release their own editions of the Prophecies. To stand out from one another, they began providing reading guides, adding indexes, and drawing attention to their products’ added value. “Of all the editions of theProphecies of Michel Nostradamus,” one of them intoned from Amsterdam in 1667, “I can affirm that there have been none more accurate than the one I am putting forth today, since it has been revised with great care according to the oldest and best editions.” Chavigny had launched this in his French Janus when he shared a gushing letter from a lord. This nameless correspondent (perhaps a real person, perhaps not) had written that Nostradamus made no sense whatsoever without Chavigny’s commentaries. Such tireless labor on behalf of others, he wrote Chavigny, would be “the source of your renown, since no one else before now has been able to penetrate such obscurities as you will have done.”²⁵

This early book blurb captures the way Nostradamian providers tried to parlay the prophet’s fame into renown for themselves. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many people struggled to win recognition within traditional institutions or bodies of knowledge. Either their birth was common, or their education insufficient, or the circle of their acquaintances too narrow. Sometimes, it was all three. Failure to secure the acceptance or status to which they felt entitled could cause deep frustration. As they searched for alternative pathways toward success and perhaps recognition, some individuals stumbled upon astrology, a hybrid, loose domain whose rules were being questioned and redrawn. Here was an opening. The same held true of Nostradamus’s predictions. At once astrological and prophetic, at once obtuse and free for the taking, at once esoteric and ubiquitous, they provided opportunities for people who sought to carve out a position or jump-start their careers. The Nostradamian provider could make something of himself and gain authority as an unparalleled guide, a benefactor of Christendom, and an intellectual presence.²⁶

This was not easy, for one had to justify oneself and defend Nostradamus against detractors. Le Roux responded with force to the critics who defiled his great prophet. This stance could suit people who felt unfairly marginalized or else had few other options. Throughout the centuries, most Nostradamian providers have had profiles similar to the lowly secretary Chavigny, the obscure priest Le Roux, and the middling doctor Garencières. They either entered a new domain with little capital, or sought to rebound after a professional failure, or else aspired to a form of authority that was missing from their lives. In so doing, all of them joined an underworld, a community—or perhaps an industry—whose members borrowed from and sought to outdo one another across the centuries.²⁷

To broaden our canvas, we might consider the Prophecies alongside the Bible. Both books spawned feelings of transcendence and embraced tradition more than social change (even if the Bible fed demands for reform). Both took off with the invention of print and spawned multiple editions, with occasional changes in the text. Both could also inspire, fascinate, terrify, or plunge readers into perplexity. With its allegories, parables, and strange words, the Bible seemed “wrapped in wrinkles,” declared an Anglican bishop in 1537. Contemporaries wondered whether the book of Revelation (controversial from the start, like the Prophecies) was a work of allegory, history, or prophecy. They could of course harbor similar questions regarding Nostradamus. For early Christian communities, Scripture had not been a fixed work, but an activity that took people from bewilderment to discussion to illumination. The Pharisee Jews had likewise placed the study of Torah (Midrash) at the center of their spirituality. Later, Europeans focused on select biblical passages and quotations, interpreted them in different ways, and read between the lines. But some of them needed help. Like the Prophecies, the Bible thus generated a bevy of commentaries, summaries, comparative alphabets, foldout maps, and scriptural aids that would guide readers.²⁸

There is an important difference between the two books, however. The history of the Bible is that of a sacred text that, despite its varied origins, came under the hold of institutions and collective movements and helped found political and moral regimes. Henry VIII’s Great Bible announced on its title page that it was published under royal authority. Over time, Puritans, Mormons, Unitarians, and others used their own translations to support their beliefs. The Bible was codified, controlled, and updated only after collective bodies had come to an agreement. It made its way into religious services and academic study groups (not to mention Western literature, thanks to its open-ended ethical questions and a potent blend of narrative and doctrine).

None of this was true of the Prophecies, which hovered between the profane and the sacred, between dependence on and independence from God. There were no institutional controls, no traditions or clergy decreeing who could parse Nostradamus’s predictions and how. Instead, we find an open expanse and motley providers who, from the outskirts of the Western world, from the edges of what was deemed respectable, made Nostradamus accessible to people from different walks of life by playing on broader yearnings for freedom and authority. These editors and counterfeiters, these guides and interpreters injected doses of novelty and mystery that percolated into the latest media and kept the free-floating Nostradamus relevant and intriguing.

All of this activity drew more readers. But it also raised new questions. Around 1600, a French publisher issued a warning about the shams who usurped the name of Nostradamus. Decades later, the tutor of the young Louis XIV invoked Michel the Younger to denounce the guile of judicial astrologers. Chavigny, too, came under fire in the nineteenth century for having made arbitrary selections, vague annotations, and baseless interpretations. The accusations are harsh, but these providers did dice Nostradamus into digestible bites, they did turn the Prophecies inside out, and they did occasionally pen their own predictions. The quatrains remained, but they were not always intact and no longer alone between the covers of the Prophecies. A century after the astrologer’s death, Thomas Hobbes complained that most of what now carried his name consisted of posthumous fabrications. This was an exaggeration, but the larger point is well-taken. The autonomous, open-ended Nostradamus did not merely invite different kinds of readings. It also absolved everyone from preserving the original text’s integrity. Freedom from oversight was also freedom from responsibility. Anything was possible. Anything could be true. The Nostradamus phenomenon was at once democratic and deeply unstable.²⁹