Latinized name used by French astrologer Michel de Nostre Dame (1503-1566). In 1555, his most famous work, The Prophecies, was published. The predictions were written in quatrains and filled with word games and multiple languages, leaving the predictions open to wide levels of interpretation. As a result, the book, or parts of it, has been in print almost continuously since that first edition. He expanded the book with two other parts in the following years. They are sometimes called “The Centuries,” referring to his division of the quatrains into sets of one hundred.