PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

Fig. 4: The first page of Boaistuau’s dedication Fig. 5: A monstrous child with four arms and
to Elizabeth I. The illuminated letters ‘A’ and four legs. This example is typical of the elaborate
‘M’ and the neat structure of the page are decoration of all the miniatures in this edition 295
apparent.
In addition, new text features, such as book-binding and new fonts, were introduced
even before the end of the fifteenth century. The use of Arabic numbers for pagination
led to more accurate indexing and cross-referencing, which was also enabled by the
faster and much wider dissemination of printed texts. The Histoire des persecutions
de l’Eglise chrestienne et catholique was Boaistuau’s sole work which contained an
index. Another new field of study was text correction. The fact that books were not
hand-copied as were manuscripts, did not mean the disappearance of errors.
University professors and educated clerics served as the first proofreaders, followed
by a higher level of correcting which was carried out by specialist editors. Printed
texts were also corrected by the writers themselves, who spotted typographical errors
or made last minute alterations. In the first edition of Histoires prodigieuses,
Boaistuau apologised in advance to his readers because he had not been given the
295 Images taken from the online collection of the Wellcome Library: http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/
(8/8/2011)
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