HISTORY We will talk about a historical figure of the 16th century: Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus. He lived in the Renaissance period. This period is defined as the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. Although Nostradamus is best known today for his quatrains considered prophetic, he was also a physician and humanist. How did Nostradamus have an influence during his lifetime and after his death? How does he fit into the renaissance? First of all, we will discuss his story during his lifetime. Michel de Nostredame was born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence on December 14, 1503. The name Nostredame comes from his Jewish grandfather, Guy de Gassonet, becoming Pierre de Nostredame during his conversion to Catholicism. Nostredame…show more content… With an experience as an apothecary, he enrolled on October 3, 1529 at the faculty of Montpellier to try to obtain a doctorate in medicine. His apothecary remedies allowed him to make himself known. But this manual profession was prohibited by the faculty and he was expelled. It is possible that his expulsion was temporary, that he re-registered on 23 October 1529, and that he nevertheless graduated in 1533. Soon after, he lives in Agen, where he takes care of home care. Around 1534, Nostredame married Henriette d'Encausse, with whom he had two children: a boy and a girl. The wife and two children died shortly afterwards, probably from the plague. After the death of his first wife, Nostredame would travel again. From 1540 to 1545 he made a tour of France where he met many scientists and doctors. In the following years, he went to Valence, Arles and Vienna. He helped fight the plague in 1544 in Marseille, in 1546 in Aix, France. On 11 November 1547 he married Anne…show more content… The book is shared in Centuries, a centuria being a set of one hundred quatrains. The seventh century remained incomplete. The first edition contains 353 prophetic quatrains, the last, published two years after the death of Nostradamus, 942 – 58 quatrains less than the 1,000 he had announced (“para. riding the mile”). A first cause for divergence between interpreters is that due to the compositional methods of the sixteenth-century printers do not guarantee perfect conformity with the original handwritten text (lost since then). The second cause of discrepancies between the interpreters is Nostradamus himself. His obscure style and vocabulary, a mixture of Middle French, Latin, Greek and Provençal, give exegetes great freedom of interpretation. Nostradamus willingly claimed to have applied a whole series of divinatory procedures. It is doubtful, however, that he actually used these processes, and it is more likely that his main method was the projection into the future of pre-existing prophecies and historical narratives. The most famous of the prophetic quatrains of Nostradamus is the thirty-fifth of the first centuria According to the followers of a prophetic reading, this quatrain would announce the death of Henry II. In June 1559, King Henry II faced the Earl of Montgommery at a chivalry tournament. They reportedly both wore a lion as their insignia. Henry II received a section of his opponent’s
