Grey board binding with white title and Nostadamus image on the front board.

• F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

At the beginning of World War II, people turned to Nostradamus for clues as to how and when that conflict would be resolved and to look for indications that somehow he had prophesied it. Some used Nostradamus for propaganda, or profit, or publicity. Of course, this was also the case after the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Now with the worldwide COVID19 pandemic, people are looking to see if Nostradamus predicted this calamity. This edition is annotated and attempts to answer this very question.

Review: Having watched a programme about Nostradamus I bought this. However I find these quatrains so obscure that you could make them fit anything you wanted to.

 Portrait by his son Cesar, c. 1614, nearly fifty years after his death

Michel de Nostredame (December 1503 – July 1566), usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties (published in 1555), a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.

Nostradamus’s father’s family had originally been Jewish, but had converted to Catholic Christianity a generation before Nostradamus was born. He studied at the University of Avignon, but was forced to leave after just over a year when the university closed due to an outbreak of the plague. He worked as an apothecary for several years before entering the University of Montpellier, hoping to earn a doctorate, but was almost immediately expelled after his work as an apothecary (a manual trade forbidden by university statutes) was discovered. He first married in 1531, but his wife and two children died in 1534 during another plague outbreak. He fought alongside doctors against the plague before remarrying to Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children. He wrote an almanac for 1550 and, as a result of its success, continued writing them for future years as he began working as an astrologer for various wealthy patrons. Catherine de’ Medici became one of his foremost supporters. His Les Prophéties, published in 1555, relied heavily on historical and literary precedent, and initially received mixed reception. He suffered from severe gout toward the end of his life, which eventually developed into edema. He died on 1 or 2 July 1566. Many popular authors have retold apocryphal legends about his life.

In the years since the publication of his Les Prophéties, Nostradamus has attracted many supporters, who, along with some of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events. Academic sources reject the notion that Nostradamus had any genuine supernatural prophetic abilities and maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’s quatrains are the result of (sometimes deliberate) misinterpretations or mistranslations. These academics also argue that Nostradamus’s predictions are characteristically vague, meaning they could be applied to virtually anything, and are useless for determining whether their author had any real prophetic powers.

An 1804 portrait of Shipton with a monkey or familiar, taken from an oil painting dating from at least a century earlier.

Yorkshire’s own Nostradamus, Mother Shipton: Ursula Southeil (c. 1488 – 1561; also variously spelt as Ursula Southill, Ursula Soothtell or Ursula Sontheil), popularly known as Mother Shipton, was an English soothsayer and prophetess according to English folklore.

She has sometimes been described as a witch and is associated with folklore involving the origin of the Rollright Stones of Oxfordshire, reportedly a king and his men transformed to stone after failing her test. William Camden reported an account of this in a rhyming version in 1610.

The first known edition of her prophecies was printed in 1641, eighty years after her reported death. This timing suggests that what was published was a legendary or mythical account. It contained numerous mainly regional predictions and only two prophetic verses.

One of the most notable editions of her prophecies was published in 1684. It gave her birthplace as Knaresborough, Yorkshire, in a cave now known as Mother Shipton’s Cave. The book reputed Shipton to be hideously ugly, and that she had married Toby Shipton, a local carpenter, near York in 1512, and told fortunes and made predictions throughout her life.