Nostradamus: A Healer of Souls in the Renaissance

Abstract

This welcome translation of a book first published in 2011 introduces Anglophone readers not only to its subject, Nostradamus, but also to the historiographical methods of its author. Denis Crouzet’s radical approach rescues Nostradamus from marginalization as a prophet of doom, reading his work not as the cryptic prediction of a horrific future but as an urgent call for a renewed consciousness of God. Nostradamus’s enigmatic writing is thus less an invitation to interpretation than a moral lesson, reminding fallen man of the folly of trusting in reason. The Apocalyptic panic his litany of horrors induces is prescribed—much like the laughter of his fellow medic, François Rabelais—to turn despairing readers away from a cruelly violent world and towards hope in God. This re-reading of Nostradamus nuances his religious position, casting him as a non-confessional believer influenced by evangelism. An attractively literary contextualization of Nostradamus’s thought is supported by references to writers such as Maurice Scève, Marguerite de Navarre, Cornelius Agrippa and, particularly, Rabelais and Erasmus. Crouzet concludes by situating his interpretation of Nostradamus within a broad overview of his own work, in which he emphasizes the value of using the collective imagination as a way of understanding the past. This slightly self-indulgent conclusion constitutes an excellent introduction to Crouzet’s works, since this is the first of his books to have been translated into English. For the most part, the translation reads very well: Mark Greengrass has successfully captured Crouzet’s style while adapting and clarifying his expression to suit Anglophone ears, although it is here that a few niggling errors have crept in [authorship of The Praise of Folly (p. 48) and the Iliad (p. 90) has been misattributed, as has the date of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (p. 264); there are some slight mistranslations of quotations from Latin (pp. 16 and 55) and from Nostradamus (pp. 24 and 154), turning the glosses that follow into non-sequiturs; the unidentified ‘follower of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples’ (p. 232) is Gérard Roussel; more careful proof-reading would have kept Nemesis (p. 50) female and seen the ‘reign of the Sun’ (pp. 179–180) logically follow that of the moon]. But these are incidental details in a book that—like its subject—operates cumulatively and at a higher level, providing a new reading of Nostradamus, a valuable insight into the collective imagination of sixteenth-century France, and a robust defence of a very appealing historiographical method.