The True Prophecies or Prognostications - A Work Full of Curiosity and Learning -
Michael Nostradamus, Translated and Commented by Theophilus de Garencieres, Doctor in Physick Colleg. London
1672 - Printed by Thomas Ratcliffe and Nathaniel Thompson, London - First Edition in English
A nice clean copy of the first English translation of Nostradamus, with the engraved frontispiece. With the original French quatrains, followed by the English translations and commentary. Prefacing this is ‘The Life of Michael Nostradamus’.
Michel de Nostredame ‘began his prophetic writings in the early 1540s with a series of short yearly almanacs in which he made predictions in verse. The new art of printing gratified a popular demand for supernaturally acquired 'certainty,' and such almanacs were a common literary production of the day. It was with Les Prophéties (1555), however, that Nostradamus became an author of contemporary reputation and a figure who has had an impact on later history… [His more than 1000 rhyming quatrains, arranged in ‘centuries’ of 100] constitute the largest body of prophetic verse prepared to that day, perhaps in all literature’. (Clute & Grant). Theophilus de Garencières, a French apothecary and occultist living in England, provided the first English translation of the famous prophecies of Nostradamus, along with explanations for each, (with a few exceptions for those entries either too obvious to require it or too obscure to interpret). However, Garencières unknowingly used a fake edition of Nostradamus’s work, printed in 1649, which contained two quatrains, known as the Mazarin Quatrains, that were forged by an unknown author in order to discredit and foretell the downfall of Cardinal Jules Mazarin, prime minister of France.  More Details
Price: HK$ 95,000 |
