Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon

Conrad Lycosthenes' huge and influential Latin anthology of omens entitled 'Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon... ab exordio mundi usque ad haec nostra tempora' ['Chronicle of Omens and Portents ...
from the beginning of the world up to these our present times'] was published in Basel, Switzerland, in 1557, when Nostradamus was in the very midst of writing his Prophecies. Rare and little-known today, it reproduces literally hundreds of omen-reports spanning the whole of known history, including the particularly important collection by Julius Obsequens (4th century AD) and the almost contemporary collections by Peucerus (1553), Frytschius (1555) and Fincelius (1556)
-- all four of which, it is clear from simple inspection, were freely borrowed by Nostradamus as a basis for his own 'omen'-predictions (mainly in his first three Centuries), though in his case without acknowledgement. [He seems not to have borrowed more than a handful of omen-reports directly from Lycosthenes's book itself, however, since he seems rather to have lost interest in omens by 1557.]
Better still, Lycosthenes' book illustrates many of his reports with magnificent woodcuts (some of them used more than once), as well as indicating their dates in the margins -- though Lycosthenes' Roman dates BC are all two years out. The omens surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar on 44 BC, for example, are listed as for 42 BC (pages 221-5, and faithfully reflected by Nostradamus at II.41, II.43 and elsewhere), apparently thanks to a faulty formula for converting the original Roman dates based on that of the foundation of Rome.

Much of Lycosthenes' 'Chronicle' was subsequently translated into contemporary English by Dr Stephen Batman in his hugely popular 'The Doome, Warning to All Men' of 1581, which supplemented it with further reports gleaned by Batman mainly from England, especially during the 24 years that followed the publication of Lycosthenes' book.
Eccentric though its page-numbering is, you can now consult the part of it covering Nostradamus's lifetime and the period just beforehand at http://www.propheties.it/batman/batman.html.
Its wonderfully unpredictable spelling and punctuation give a good idea of just how much importance should be attached to Nostradamus's own!

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Thank you to Peter Lemesurier

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Last update 16 April 2005