In time for the end of the world- The first major literary presentation of Nostradamus's Prophecies, newly translated and edited by prize-winning scholars
The mysterious quatrains of the sixteenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus have long proved captivating for their predictions. Nostradamus has been credited with anticipating the Great Fire of London, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today, as the world grapples with financial meltdowns, global terrorism, and environmental disasters - as well as the Mayan prediction of the apocalypse on December 21, 2012 - his prophecies of doom have assumed heightened relevance.
How has the Propheciesoutlasted most books from the Renaissance? This edition finds answers in the historical context from which it emerged - the founding moment of Western modernity, and era of great upheaval marked by the Protestant Reformation, the sack of Rome, Ottoman advances, the Copernican revolution, the discovery of the Americans, and the accelerated dissemination of ideas with the development of the printing press - and in the poetics of its quatrains, whose cadences and apocalyptic strains are considered in terms of Virgil, Dante, Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats, and Pound.
A revelatory new translation with the original French on facing pages, this edition also features extensive introductory and supplementary material - including a fascinating catalog of the verses that have provoked the most speculation over the centuries, and the historical events they've been used to explain - all helping to illuminate the cultural, political, and historical forces that resonate throughout Nostradamus's epic and give it its visionary power.
considers its legacy in terms of the poetics of the quatrains, published here in a brilliant new translation and with introductory material and notes mapping the cultural, political, and historical forces that resonate throughout Nostradamus's epic, giving it its visionary power.
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