mous play for her alleged decadence. In
1441 she returned with her family to Ve-
rona, where she studied the Bible and clas-
sical authors, lived with her family, avoided
marriage, and wrote nothing that has sur-
vived to modern times.
Her letters were considered good
enough to be copied and circulated, how-
ever, and reached a wide audience, from
Venice to Rome, by the middle of the fif-
teenth century. Later in her life Nogarola
aspired to a synthesis of Christian ethics
with the emerging humanist philosophy.
In 1451 she came out of isolation to de-
bate Ludovico Foscarini of Venice, a diplo-
mat then living in Verona. From their cor-
respondence and argument she authored a
dialogue,Of the Equal or Unequal Sin of
Adam and Eve, over the fall of humanity
into sinfulness and God’s expulsion of
Adam and Even from the Garden of Eden.
In hundreds of letters, Nogarola defended
Eve and maintained her sins and guilt to
be less than those of Adam—contrary to
the popular and traditional view that Eve’s
temptation of Adam was the cause of the
expulsion. After her death the dialogue was
published, along with her lone surviving
poem,Elegia de Laudibus Cyanei Ruris,a
eulogy praising the charms of the coun-
tryside.
Nostradamus ..................................
(1503–1566)
A French physician and prognosticator,
whose fame as a Renaissance prophet has
endured into modern times. “Nostrada-
mus” is the Latin form of his given name,
Michel de Nostredame. Born in the town
of Saint Remy de Provence, the son of a
grain dealer, he studied at the University
of Avignon but left after a short time when
a plague struck southern France and the
university closed. He then studied medi-
cine for a brief time at the University of
Montpelier, which expelled him for engag-
ing in the lowly craft of apothecary. De-
ciding on a career as a physician, he moved
to Agen at the invitation of a celebrated
Italian scholar and physician, Jules-Cesar
Scaliger.
Nostradamus’s brief training as a phy-
sician, his knowledge of medicines, and
his assumed title of “Doctor” gained him a
reputation as a healer. During an epidemic
of plague in 1546–1547 he treated and
cured many cases of the disease—so it was
believed. In 1547, he settled in Salon de
Provence, where his marriage to a wealthy
widow provided him with the means to
buy a comfortable house and write at his
leisure. He made several voyages to Italy, a
land that kindled his interest in the arts of
magic and prophecy. In 1550, he began
writing a yearly almanac, a calendar ac-
companied by prophecies written in the
form of four-line verses known as qua-
trains. The almanacs found a large audi-
ence, and as his reputation spread people
began calling on Nostradamus for his ser-
vices as an astrologer and seer. He began
collecting the quatrains separately and
published them inLe Propheties, which
first appeared in 1555 and in which the
verses are grouped in sets of 100 known as
a “century.” With an ambition to publish
1,000 of his short and obscure poems, he
published a second edition in 1557 and a
third in 1558; all three surviving volumes
ofLe Prophetiescontain a grand total of
942 quatrains, all but one of them rhym-
ing.
Nostradamus based his predictions on
his own knowledge of the Bible, of his-
torical events, of classical Latin authors
such as Livy and Plutarch, on medieval
historians such as Jean Froissart and seers
such as Girolamo Savonarola, and on as-
trology. He sought to create a system ofNostradamus