Georges Dumézil ; Translated By Betsy Wing.

Dumézil, Georges, 1898-1986

Dumézil, Professor Georges

Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press

Parallax re-visions of culture and society, Baltimore, Md, 1999

United States, United States of America

First American Edition, 1999

March 9, 1999

Modern readers tend to dismiss Nostradamus as a leftover from superstitious ages or as an inspired visionary. In this book Georges Dumezil, renowned scholar of myth and religion, takes Nostradamus very seriously indeed. Can one foresee the future, Dumezil asks, and fail to understand it?At the beginning of the nineteenth century, commentators on Nostradamus found in the twentieth quatrain of Nostradamus's Century 9 a bundle of precise details that seemed to predict the arrest of Louis XVI as he fled the French Revolution. Other details in the quatrain remained unexplained. Why was the person described as "le moyne noir"? What did the second verse signify: "Deux parts, vaultorte, Herne, la pierre blanche"? Given these puzzles, what can scholarship contribute to their understanding?Dumezil explores three possibilities: a philological and historical study of the text to clarify its enigmas by a deeper investigation of Louis XVI's unsuccessful flight to Varennes; a logical analysis, determining how Nostradamus would have interpreted a view of the eighteenth century from his vantage in the sixteenth; and, finally, a metaphysical inquiry into the status and process of prediction. Written in dialog form, The Riddle of Nostradamus is one of Dumezil's most arresting works, challenging dogmas, even scholarly ones, and raising sharp questions about how much we want to know, and why.

xiv, 124 p. ; 23 cm

2024-07-01