La Poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus: langue, style et genre des ‘Centuries’ La Poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus: langue, style et genre des ‘Centuries’. By A <scp>nna</scp> C <scp>arlsted</scp> . University of Stockholm, 2005. 200 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book, which was first presented as a doctoral dissertation, aims to reconcile the different critical trends that surround the figure of Nostradamus and his famous text the Centuries by attempting to show that Nostradamus was neither just a prophet nor just a poet but both. The inclusive approach of Anna Carlsted, while it does not neglect the esoteric speculations that have accompanied the Centuries since it was first published in 1555, grounds itself more in a philological and historical perspective. To show that Nostradamus is the best representative of the genre defined as ‘poético-oraculaire’ and that his quatrains are doubly poetic and prophetic, Carlsted undertakes a rigorous and detailed quantitative stylistic and linguistic analysis which she enriches by a comparative study with the works of the other famous poets of the time such as Ronsard, Scève and Du Bellay among others. A quantitative approach allows Carlsted to put hypotheses to the test and shows clearly that Nostradamus, aware of the common literary and esthetical usages of the time, followed them and, when he did not, it was because he was taking poetic licence deliberately to add ambiguity and obscurity to his poetry. Carlsted's study of Nostradamus' use of language and themes strengthens her argument that Nostradamus is not only a prophet of the past as claimed by R. Prévost, nor is he only a prophet of doom for the future as Dumézil or M. E. Roth-Rose would have it; neither is he just a failed poet, nor as Crouzet describes him just ‘un poète à couper le souffle’. Rather, he is all of these, poet and prophet, and thus not so different from the other poets of the time. At the same time, Nostradamus manages to conjoin more intimately poetry and prophecy, helped in this by a melancholic disposition that added to his prophecies and visions an apocalyptic taint. Carlsted's inclusive argument is convincing and intriguing. My only objection lies in the rapidity with which Carlsted concludes that Nostradamus is perhaps less of a prophet and more a humanist. Caring for humankind, Nostradamus' poetry expresses the despair of human beings facing the ‘glaive de la mort’. This definition of humanism is vague and could have gained by being better placed within its sixteenth-century context and by being examined in relation to the notion of prophet, as not making a clear difference between the two notions seems to render the argument circular: are all humanists prophets? Does being called a prophet exclude being called a humanist? In what sense can a prophet who cares for humankind at the behest of God be a humanist? These questions only underscore the fact that this well organised and stimulating study constitutes an important contribution to Nostradamus scholarship and will definitely encourage readers to appreciate the poetry as well as the prophecies of the famous quatrains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".