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In 16th Century
Europe, the censors could be very dangerous. A person could be burned at the stake
for writing a book of predictions. The Nostradamus Quatrains had the added obscurity of being
poems, which had to rhyme and follow a beat of ten syllables for each line. He wrote the Quatrains
primarily in French. To make it all seem a little more obscure and vague, Nostradamus added a
few words of Latin and Old French. He used only 100 words from all the other langages. Finally,
he penned his lines very cryptically and ambiguously, so as to avoid the Catholic Inquisition. His book
has always sold well, being continously in print since it was first published in 1555. The skeptics
of the day panned the book, however. Videl in 1558 didn't have a high opinion at all of this
"lunatic brainless fool", while Fulke in 1560 was highly critical of his "useless astrological predictions."
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