Certainly there is no warrant for assuming—as would-be "code-breakers" are prone to do—that either the spellings or the punctuation of any edition are Nostradamus' originals.
The success of his almanacs soon brought a measure of fame and success to Nostradamus, such that nobility and other prominent persons soon began asking him for horoscopes and other advice.
Another important addition to the literature was Erika Cheetham's well-known The Prophecies of Nostradamus, which incorporated a translation of the posthumous 1568 edition of the Propheties.
Most of the remaining seats were won by minor parties that only contest election in one part of Italy, like the South Tyrolean People's Party and the Movement for Autonomies.
At the age of fifteen, Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate.
Intriguingly, many of these texts go beyond the prophecies of Nostradamus and suggest that many aspects of his biography were, in fact, supernatural.
At present, a tremendous range of divergent opinions about Nostradamus can be seen in printed literature and on the internet.
Following popular trends, he wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinizing his name from Nostredame to Nostradamus.
After receiving a humanitarian award from the Anne Frank Foundation in 1994, Nelson Mandela addressed a crowd in Johannesburg, saying he had read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much encouragement from it."
One of their most potent arguments is that there is no evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any of Nostradamus' quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance.
Nostradamus' reliance on historical precedent is reflected in the fact that he explicitly rejected the label "prophet" (i.e.
After his expulsion, Nostradamus continued working, presumably as an apothecary, and became famous for creating a "rose pill" that supposedly protected against the plague.
Nostradamus was one of the first to re-paraphrase these prophecies in French, which may explain why they are often credited to him.
By 1566, Nostradamus' gout, which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into edema (colloquially known as "dropsy").
Astrology itself, as a method, is mentioned only twice in Nostradamus' "Preface" and 41 times in the "Centuries," though it is discussed more frequently in his dedicatory Letter to King Henri II.
Between 1556 and 1567, Nostradamus and his wife acquired a one-thirteenth share in a huge canal project organized by Adam de Craponne to irrigate largely waterless Salon and the Dйsert de la Crau.
Some scholars believe that Nostradamus did not compose his text as prophecy, but instead as a means of apocryphally commenting upon events in his own time.
Given his reliance on literary sources, it is doubtful whether Nostradamus used any particular method for achieving revelations (i.e.
At the other end of the spectrum are the spate of recent popular books and websites arguing that Nostradamus was a true prophet.
In 1531, Nostradamus was invited by Jules-Cйsar Scaliger, a leading Renaissance scholar, to visit him at his home in Agen.