Early modern almanacs often contained astrological forecasts.Cat Hammarskjold wrote: ↑Tue Jun 13, 2017 10:21 pm I went with Diderot for FJ because I saw the word "almanac" and thought that medieval French author+reference book=Diderot in terms of askable people on J!. I had no idea anything that Nostradamus wrote would be considered an almanac.
But while there were ways to figure this out through esoteric knowledge, I think "Name a sixteenth-century Frenchman" was also a way to get at it. Michel de Montaigne is also fairly well-known and is a more genuinely important figure than Nostradamus, but he only comes up twice in the archive (never as a response) compared to over two dozen appearances for Nostradamus (including a whole category in 2005).
ETA: There was also John Calvin as mentioned below. Easy to forget that he was really French.