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Nostradamus: How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom
WE ALL KNOW THE NAME NOSTRADAMUS, BUT WHO WAS HE REALLY? WHY DID HIS PREDICTIONS BECOME SO INFLUENTIAL IN RENAISSANCE EUROPE AND THEN KEEP RESURFACING FOR NEARLY FIVE CENTURIES? AND WHAT DOES NOSTRADAMUS'S ENDURANCE IN THE WEST SAY ABOUT US AND OUR OWN WORLD?
In How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom , historian Stéphane Gerson takes readers on a journey back in time to explore the life and afterlife of Michel de Nostredame. Whenever we seem to enter a new era, whenever the premises of our worldview are questioned or imperiled, Nostradamus offers certainty and solace. In 1666, guests at posh English dinner parties discussed his quatrain about the Great Fire of London. In 1942, the Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky latched her hopes for survival to Nostradamus' prediction that the war would soon end. And on September 12, 2001, teenagers proclaimed on the streets of Brooklyn that "this guy Nostradamus" had seen the 9/11 attacks coming.
In chronicling the life of this mystifying figure and the lasting fascination with his predictions, Gerson's book becomes a historical biography of a the faith that we can know tomorrow and master our anxieties through the powers of an extraordinary but ever more elusive seer.
In How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom , historian Stéphane Gerson takes readers on a journey back in time to explore the life and afterlife of Michel de Nostredame. Whenever we seem to enter a new era, whenever the premises of our worldview are questioned or imperiled, Nostradamus offers certainty and solace. In 1666, guests at posh English dinner parties discussed his quatrain about the Great Fire of London. In 1942, the Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky latched her hopes for survival to Nostradamus' prediction that the war would soon end. And on September 12, 2001, teenagers proclaimed on the streets of Brooklyn that "this guy Nostradamus" had seen the 9/11 attacks coming.
In chronicling the life of this mystifying figure and the lasting fascination with his predictions, Gerson's book becomes a historical biography of a the faith that we can know tomorrow and master our anxieties through the powers of an extraordinary but ever more elusive seer.
368 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2012
About the author
Stephane Gerson
10 books34 followersStéphane Gerson is a cultural historian of modern France and a Professor of French Studies at NYU. He has won several awards, including the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History and the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. Gerson lives in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY, with his family.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 18, 2013
In this account of Nostradamus, Stephane Gerson attempts to portray the man and his afterlife as a Prophet of Doom. While he partially succeeds in the latter, the book leaves much unaccomplished as an exacting biography of this famous historical personality. Perhaps the author can be partly forgiven in that Michel de Nostradame did not leave many historical trails behind from which an authentic biography could be constructed. However, it still falls short in assembling all the facts together and cogently so as to provide the reader with a broad, coherent picture of the man and his context. Instead, this account vascillates between what can be considered fact and hearsay, and one is left wondering whether the cult of Nostradamus can ever make it beyond the stuff of legend. Even so, some facts presented by Gerson add considerably to the reader's knowledge - notably, an account of the many kith and kin who continued the Nostradamian connection along with contemporaries and counterfeit prophets, who also appealed to Nostradamus for their authenticity.
This narrative fares much better in the analysis of Nostradamus' afterlife, and how his highly nebulous quatrains were interpreted to foreshadow many tumultuous events from the French Revolution, the rise of Hitler, both World Wars, and the unfortunate events of 9/11. Publishers and printers, movie studios and television producers used Nostradamus to great effect to drive commercial propoganda. Ultimately, Gerson argues, the sustainability of Nostradamus' prophecies speak more to the deep distraught and isolation of people over the centuries. The response to this anguish is the invention of apocalypses, where Nostradamus and his prophecies became the leading monopoly as agents of fear.
This work has much content, but its factual and disconnected style force consumption of its pages in interrupted spurts. Progress slows to a dribble as one reaches the epilogue, and the account concludes leaving the reader wondering if what was digested was a work of psychology, biography, history, or sociology - not very definitive, just like Nostradamus' quatrains!
This narrative fares much better in the analysis of Nostradamus' afterlife, and how his highly nebulous quatrains were interpreted to foreshadow many tumultuous events from the French Revolution, the rise of Hitler, both World Wars, and the unfortunate events of 9/11. Publishers and printers, movie studios and television producers used Nostradamus to great effect to drive commercial propoganda. Ultimately, Gerson argues, the sustainability of Nostradamus' prophecies speak more to the deep distraught and isolation of people over the centuries. The response to this anguish is the invention of apocalypses, where Nostradamus and his prophecies became the leading monopoly as agents of fear.
This work has much content, but its factual and disconnected style force consumption of its pages in interrupted spurts. Progress slows to a dribble as one reaches the epilogue, and the account concludes leaving the reader wondering if what was digested was a work of psychology, biography, history, or sociology - not very definitive, just like Nostradamus' quatrains!
July 3, 2022
While there was some interesting info on French history here (how Nostradamus was viewed over time) and exploration into the little that is known of the actual guy, it gets bogged down in occasionally boring minutiae and tangents that drag on and on. Particularly the pontifications on societal tends towards doom prophecy, it’s mostly déjà vu all over again through the ages. But with that said, you get a real understanding of how history echoes and nothing is really knew. If you want a book about Nostradamus it’s a bit of a miss, but if you want a book about the idea of Nostradamus in history it might be up your alley more. Just a tad too dry overall.
May 20, 2024
Delusion
September 9, 2013
‘Words are slippery and thought is viscous,” Henry Adams said more than a century ago. He was wondering about science, its increasing precision in describing the sensory world and its failure to penetrate the realms of individual experience. Adams had bumped into one of the modern world’s thorniest dilemmas: For all of science’s power to shape the world, it failed to comprehend the chaos of everyday life.
In this fascinating and extensively researched book, Stephane Gerson, a historian of French culture, explores this dilemma by telling the story of Nostradamus and what he has meant to generations of readers. It is an inspired choice of subject. Nostradamus’s fame (and infamy) as an oracle persists even in the heart of this scientific age because he touches on aspects of human experience beyond science’s ken.
(St. Martin's) - ‘Nostradamus: How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom’ by Stéphane Gerson
Gerson nicely sketches the social world that influenced the prophet’s work. Born in 1503, Michel de Nostredame, as his contemporaries knew him, lived the life of a Renaissance humanist. He was proficient in several languages, traveled widely and studied herbs and medicine. He worked on the front lines during an outbreak of plague. Around 1550, he settled, married a rich widow and started his second family. (His first wife and their two children had died in the 1530s.)
Astrology was part of the medical curriculum then, and he dedicated himself to its practice. His successes won him a place as adviser to Catherine de Medicis, France’s queen mother. In 1555, he published the first edition of his most famous work, “The Prophecies,” a series of four-line poems that foretold the distant future.
Nostradamus described a world of pain and suffering. There would be battles, death and defeat. Rivers would run red with blood. But when? Where? On this, he would not be pinned down. Influenced by the allegorical poetry of his contemporaries, he pushed ambiguity to its limit. The quatrains, Gerson writes, “hang together in some fashion, but, without the glue of punctuation, conjunctions, and conventional word order, they are unmoored.” Publishers and printers compounded the confusion by changing words and putting out pirated editions. The final edition of “The Prophecies” appeared two years after its author’s death. It is impossible to know which editions were unauthorized and which were his — but it hardly matters. By then, the man had given way to the phenomenon. Nostredame became Nostradamus.
And it was Nostradamus whose slippery words spoke to the chaos of everyday life, the events that seemed too awesome for science and reason to explain. After the biographical chapters, Gerson follows the fortunes of Nostradamus through French cultural history, showing how different people tried to make sense of the prophet, some reading him naively, others playfully, combining a commitment to science with a fascination about superstition.
The French Revolution promised an enlightened age of liberty, equality and fraternity, but the age also witnessed a renewed enthusiasm for Nostradamus. Interest in the prophet was not, as the elites of the day had it, proof that old superstitions needed to be stamped out but, rather, an indication that Nostradamus spoke to the uncertainty of the times. World War II also inspired fascination with Nostradamus, for a similar reason. The products of science and reason could obliterate the world, but they could not explain, or predict, the course of everyday lives.
It is tragedy, Gerson concludes, that accounts for much of Nostradamus’s resilience. At times when chaos breaks through the quotidian order, the prophet offers succor, although each era reads him differently. In the early years of the 21st century, Gerson suggests, proliferating paranoia and conspiracy-mongering — filling the void left by the declining legitimacy of religion, the state and other forms of traditional authority — feed interest in Nostradamus. Gerson even reflects on his own interest. He’s committed to rationalism, he says, but could not deny the allure of Nostradamus and magical thinking after the death of his youngest son in a rafting accident.
Science no longer has the cachet it did when Henry Adams wrote. Nuclear weapons, pollution and antibiotic resistance have left it one more authority in decline. But science is not going away, nor is the tension between science and experience, although the balance may shift one way or the other. And so, even knowing the slipperiness of words and the dangers of prophecy, it can be foretold that the concerned and the curious, the confused and the critical, will keep turning to Nostradamus.
In this fascinating and extensively researched book, Stephane Gerson, a historian of French culture, explores this dilemma by telling the story of Nostradamus and what he has meant to generations of readers. It is an inspired choice of subject. Nostradamus’s fame (and infamy) as an oracle persists even in the heart of this scientific age because he touches on aspects of human experience beyond science’s ken.
(St. Martin's) - ‘Nostradamus: How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom’ by Stéphane Gerson
Gerson nicely sketches the social world that influenced the prophet’s work. Born in 1503, Michel de Nostredame, as his contemporaries knew him, lived the life of a Renaissance humanist. He was proficient in several languages, traveled widely and studied herbs and medicine. He worked on the front lines during an outbreak of plague. Around 1550, he settled, married a rich widow and started his second family. (His first wife and their two children had died in the 1530s.)
Astrology was part of the medical curriculum then, and he dedicated himself to its practice. His successes won him a place as adviser to Catherine de Medicis, France’s queen mother. In 1555, he published the first edition of his most famous work, “The Prophecies,” a series of four-line poems that foretold the distant future.
Nostradamus described a world of pain and suffering. There would be battles, death and defeat. Rivers would run red with blood. But when? Where? On this, he would not be pinned down. Influenced by the allegorical poetry of his contemporaries, he pushed ambiguity to its limit. The quatrains, Gerson writes, “hang together in some fashion, but, without the glue of punctuation, conjunctions, and conventional word order, they are unmoored.” Publishers and printers compounded the confusion by changing words and putting out pirated editions. The final edition of “The Prophecies” appeared two years after its author’s death. It is impossible to know which editions were unauthorized and which were his — but it hardly matters. By then, the man had given way to the phenomenon. Nostredame became Nostradamus.
And it was Nostradamus whose slippery words spoke to the chaos of everyday life, the events that seemed too awesome for science and reason to explain. After the biographical chapters, Gerson follows the fortunes of Nostradamus through French cultural history, showing how different people tried to make sense of the prophet, some reading him naively, others playfully, combining a commitment to science with a fascination about superstition.
The French Revolution promised an enlightened age of liberty, equality and fraternity, but the age also witnessed a renewed enthusiasm for Nostradamus. Interest in the prophet was not, as the elites of the day had it, proof that old superstitions needed to be stamped out but, rather, an indication that Nostradamus spoke to the uncertainty of the times. World War II also inspired fascination with Nostradamus, for a similar reason. The products of science and reason could obliterate the world, but they could not explain, or predict, the course of everyday lives.
It is tragedy, Gerson concludes, that accounts for much of Nostradamus’s resilience. At times when chaos breaks through the quotidian order, the prophet offers succor, although each era reads him differently. In the early years of the 21st century, Gerson suggests, proliferating paranoia and conspiracy-mongering — filling the void left by the declining legitimacy of religion, the state and other forms of traditional authority — feed interest in Nostradamus. Gerson even reflects on his own interest. He’s committed to rationalism, he says, but could not deny the allure of Nostradamus and magical thinking after the death of his youngest son in a rafting accident.
Science no longer has the cachet it did when Henry Adams wrote. Nuclear weapons, pollution and antibiotic resistance have left it one more authority in decline. But science is not going away, nor is the tension between science and experience, although the balance may shift one way or the other. And so, even knowing the slipperiness of words and the dangers of prophecy, it can be foretold that the concerned and the curious, the confused and the critical, will keep turning to Nostradamus.
July 5, 2014
Why should one astrologer, and only one, of thousands all over Europe in the mid-16th century, have survived till our time as more than a curiosity but a seer, a guide to the present and the future? Mr. Gerson doesn't provide a complete answer, but he has a good (and well-informed) time trying. It's partly good old marketing, both in Michel Nostredame's own lifetime and after, as "Nostradamus". Through the years, different "providers" showed some skill in finding and keeping an audience, revealing different messages for changing circumstances -- Nostro's quatrains can mean pretty much anything if you put your mind to it, and where there were no apposite lines, well you can always add a few. So he "predicted" all sorts of things from the Fire of London to the Gulf War (Saddam was a fan, would you believe?)
The appeal is also something a little stranger. The Nostradamus brand does best in anxious times, when life is uncertain and the future shadowed by fear. His dark forebodings speak to our inner terrors, and it seems, to our strange fascination with the opposite of what we think we want -- annihilation rather than security; death, not life. Gerson quotes Rebecca West for example on why a rich, peaceful Europe plunged over the cliff in 1914: "Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations." ("Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," p.1101 or thereabouts.)
(Stefan Zweig speaks in the same way, having seen the psychosis at first hand not once but twice, and suffered greatly thereby. "Europe seemed to me doomed to die by its own madness," was his reflection in "The World of Yesterday" as he watched the Spanish Civil War unfold in 1936. But that's another review.)
There's much more, and Gerson teases out the different strands for us, avoiding academese for the most part--though he isn't the greatest stylist you'll ever read. Given all the BS about Nostradamus, I was surprised to find "Nostradamus" such an unsensational and genuinely interesting read.
The appeal is also something a little stranger. The Nostradamus brand does best in anxious times, when life is uncertain and the future shadowed by fear. His dark forebodings speak to our inner terrors, and it seems, to our strange fascination with the opposite of what we think we want -- annihilation rather than security; death, not life. Gerson quotes Rebecca West for example on why a rich, peaceful Europe plunged over the cliff in 1914: "Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations." ("Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," p.1101 or thereabouts.)
(Stefan Zweig speaks in the same way, having seen the psychosis at first hand not once but twice, and suffered greatly thereby. "Europe seemed to me doomed to die by its own madness," was his reflection in "The World of Yesterday" as he watched the Spanish Civil War unfold in 1936. But that's another review.)
There's much more, and Gerson teases out the different strands for us, avoiding academese for the most part--though he isn't the greatest stylist you'll ever read. Given all the BS about Nostradamus, I was surprised to find "Nostradamus" such an unsensational and genuinely interesting read.
November 19, 2012
“Nostradamus” by Stephane Gerson, published by St. Martin’s Press.
Category – Biography/History
The name Nostradamus is often associated with gloom and doom, and rightfully so. Nostradamus was a doctor and astrologer in the 1500’s who made predictions into the future. Not only did he make predictions but an uncanny amount of them might have been correct.
Nostradamus wrote his predictions in poetry form called quatrains. These quatrains predicted wars, famine, and other catastrophic events. Some of Nostradamus’s detractor’s claim that many of his predictions did not happen and those that did could have been interpreted in different ways. It seems that there was more than one way to decipher his quatrains. Regardless of how you feel, one must admit there have been hundreds of soothsayers through the years but none has seen the lasting notoriety of Nostradamus.
Although Gerson’s book gives a history of Nostradamus and studies his more famous quatrains, Gerson has taken a different approach to the Nostradamus phenomenon. Gerson studies the philosophical and psychological affect this man has had on people throughout the ages. He still is able to instill fear with predictions he made in the 1500’s.
A book that is for the serious student of Nostradamus. I would consider this a very heavy read but one that takes a different perspective to the life and predictions of Nostradamus.
Category – Biography/History
The name Nostradamus is often associated with gloom and doom, and rightfully so. Nostradamus was a doctor and astrologer in the 1500’s who made predictions into the future. Not only did he make predictions but an uncanny amount of them might have been correct.
Nostradamus wrote his predictions in poetry form called quatrains. These quatrains predicted wars, famine, and other catastrophic events. Some of Nostradamus’s detractor’s claim that many of his predictions did not happen and those that did could have been interpreted in different ways. It seems that there was more than one way to decipher his quatrains. Regardless of how you feel, one must admit there have been hundreds of soothsayers through the years but none has seen the lasting notoriety of Nostradamus.
Although Gerson’s book gives a history of Nostradamus and studies his more famous quatrains, Gerson has taken a different approach to the Nostradamus phenomenon. Gerson studies the philosophical and psychological affect this man has had on people throughout the ages. He still is able to instill fear with predictions he made in the 1500’s.
A book that is for the serious student of Nostradamus. I would consider this a very heavy read but one that takes a different perspective to the life and predictions of Nostradamus.
October 3, 2015
I breathe a sigh of relief as I close this book. I truly expected something else from this book. It read like a very long thesis paper. Which can be good or bad. In this case, bad = boring. Only the first chapter ends up being about his life, the rest is how other people interpreted his quatrains. Sure, that sounds interesting enough, but the way the book was formatted made it difficult to follow. It more or less moved forward in time each chapter but would then jump back to discuss someone else,
August 25, 2015
A meticulously-researched answer to the nagging question of how this obscure astrologer from the 1500's stuck around all the way into our own time. Gerson writes with the charm of a travel writer and the bibliography of an academic. A lovely read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews