A physician and astrologer by profession, Nostradamus (1503-1566) is said to have remained awake nights for several years, meditating over a brass bowl filled with water. Through these trances he supposedly could see into the future, and he set his predictions down for posterity in a twelve-volume set he entitled Centuries.

Nostradamus is the Latinized name of a sixteenth-century French prophet named Michel de Notredame. Since his death in 1566, scholars and lay people have remained fascinated by Nostradamus's forecasts, in which many future events seem to have been uncannily divined. The French Revolution, the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, and the explosion of a U.S. space shuttle were supposedly prophesied by the Renaissance scholar.

Questioned Authority

Nostradamus was born in December of 1503 in the south of France; his family was of Jewish heritage but had converted to Catholicism during a period of religious intolerance. Both of...