Nostradamus: A Healer of Souls in the Renaissance

397 Pages·2017·5.18 MB·English

by  Denis Crouzet

Nostradamus

Nostradamus
A Healer of Souls in the Renaissance
Denis Crouzet
Translated by Mark Greengrass
polity
First published in French as Nostradamus. Une médecine des âmes à la
Renaissance, © Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2011
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0769-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0770-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Crouzet, Denis, 1953- author. | Greengrass, Mark, 1949- translator.
Title: Nostradamus : a healer of souls in the Renaissance / Denis Crouzet.
Other titles: Nostradamus. English
Description: English edition. | Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006637 (print) | LCCN 2017035325 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781509507726 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509507733 (Epub) |
ISBN 9781509507696 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509507702 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Nostradamus, 1503-1566. | Prophets–France–Biography. |
Prophecies (Occultism)–France–History–16th century. | BISAC: RELIGION /
Religion, Politics & State.
Classification: LCC BF1815.N8 (ebook) | LCC BF1815.N8 C75713 2017
(print) | DDC 133.3092 [B] –dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006637
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CONTENTS
Translator’s Preface vii
Permissions and Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Fragments of History 1
1 The Place Beyond Words 5
2 A Self-Contradictory Utterance 12
3 Treasure Beneath an Oak Tree 29
4 A Would-Be Astrophile 38
5 Thresholds Dependent on Subjectivity 47
6 An Evangelist Cogito 57
7 ‘For the Common Profit of Mankind’ 63
8 ‘A Burning Mirror’ 73
9 Divine Light 80
10 From the All to the One 84
11 The Word of Creation 93
12 An Episteme of Reason 104
13 Sacredness and Nothingness 116
14 The Energetics of Obscurity 123
v
contents
15 Powers of Evil 132
16 Man Against Man 140
17 All the Sins of the World 149
18 The Horror that Invites Horror 165
19 Faith: Trials and Tribulations 172
20 From Alpha to Omega 182
21 The Philology of Angst 191
22 The Panic Paradox 204
23 The Eschatology of the Rainbow 214
24 The Ontological Turn 224
25 Liberty in Christ 231
By Way of Conclusion: Why Nostradamus? 240
Notes 271
Chronology 343
Sources and Bibliography 355
Index 371
vi
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
Denis Crouzet is one of the most distinctive voices among France’s early-
modern historians. In a sequence of landmark books, he has changed the
way we think about religious tension and violence in the period of the
post-Reformation, and especially in France. His approach is unconven-
tional, his methodologies unusual, and his style of writing idiosyncratic.
Until now, however, none of his major books has been translated into
English, and the anglophone world has not had an adequate opportunity
to sample his work. That is why I, a historian of early-modern Europe
and not a professional translator, offered to undertake this task.
Crouzet’s study of Nostradamus provides us with excellent insights
into what makes his work unique. The subject is a kind of North Face
of the Eiger for the historian, for reasons that Crouzet explains. The
resulting book is a non-biography, an essay which attempts to recon-
struct the strange mental and emotional world of Nostradamus and his
contemporaries (their collective imaginaire – the word is translated
throughout this text as ‘imaginary’). In so doing, he teases the mysterious
astrologer away from the myths which surround him and back into a
historical context which is coherent and believable. The ‘astrophile’
(which is how Nostradamus described himself) was trained and practised
as a physician, well-known for treating outbreaks of plague. Crouzet
explains how he was also concerned to treat the mental and emotional
epidemic of his time, the paroxysms created by the religious upheavals
of the Reformation. A world in which religion is the subject and object
of confrontation is the Ground Zero for Crouzet’s analysis of the
Nostradamian ‘cogito’ (or each person’s perception and creation of his
own existence). The word has been left in this text as in the original,
because it is appropriated from the works of the literary critic, Georges
vii
translator’s preface
Poulet – just one of several influences of what is known as the ‘Geneva
School of Literary Criticism’ that emerges in this text.
Crouzet analyses the peculiar, obscure and complex writings of
Nostradamus to uncover the philosophical project which lies beneath.
He shows how, in parallel with the hippocratic way of treating patients,
which looked for ways of preventing the spread of disease, Nostradamus
used augury as a method of treatment, and enigma as an instrument of
therapy. Nostradamus’ quatrains become a nebulous form of expression,
expressly designed to create a sense of disorientation, a ‘hermeneutic’ of
destabilization, in the reader. Real historical events and invented ones,
geographical locations from here and there, Biblical points of reference
and Kabbalistic allusions, past, present and future, are all mixed together
to create a strange disorientating world in which terrible atrocities and
massacres, monstrous births and deformed bodies become allegories for
human pride and sin. Nostradamus writes his enigmas as allegories, just
as his contemporary Hieronymus Bosch paints them – depictions of
human folly, blindness and stupidity, a world imprisoned in sin.
Nostradamus’ apocalyptic vision was intended to convey a truth over
and above its superficial predictive logic, to create a ‘panic’ (angoisse –
the word recurs in this text, and it has often been translated here as
‘angst’) in the mind of the reader. That angst was designed to have thera-
peutic value, to make the reader aware of man’s essential weakness. It
is at this point that Crouzet associates Nostradamus with some of the
essential ways of thinking that eventually fed through into the Reformation
movement in France. His shorthand for those patterns of thought is
‘evangelist’, and that word has been retained in this translation. There
is perhaps no better word to characterize the distinctive blend of Christian
mysticism, Biblicism, and unpolemicized sympathy for emerging
Protestant theology, which was a feature of the early, pre-Calvinist,
French Reformation. I have avoided, however, using ‘evangelism’ and
‘evangelical’ to steer the reader away from the associations which the
words suggest in their minds with gospellers from different ages and
contexts. Readers will discover that Crouzet historicizes Nostradamus
by giving him a place alongside François Rabelais, Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa, Desiderius Erasmus, and Marguerite de Navarre. I have drawn
on translations of their works from the standard editions, as
appropriate.
Retaining the distinctive sonorities of Denis Crouzet’s writing in this
translation has been a considerable challenge. Beyond it lay the ordeal
of how best to render the works of Nostradamus himself in translation.
The Prophecies have, of course, been translated into English before, and
most notably in the seventeenth century by Theophilus de Garencières,
a Paris-born physician who moved to England in the 1640s in the entou-
viii