PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

everything he disliked and suppressed material he deemed provocative or suspected of
having evangelical ideas (such as Amadour’s passage above). He noted in the preface
to the reader that he worked as if he were a sponge, ‘cleaning’ the mistakes he found
on a hand-written copy of the work: ‘que lors que cest oeuure me fut presenté pour
luy seruir d’esponge, et le nettoyer d’une infinité de faultes manifestes, qui se
retrouuoient en vne copie escrite de main’. 424 For Boaistuau, this was not an
infringement of Marguerite’s work but rather an application of the notion of
correctness which Renaissance editors shared. 425 As Nicole Cazauran noted, ‘c’est
bien son travail de ‘correcteur’ que Boaistuau lui-même vante dans l’adresse aux
lecteurs’. 426 Proud of the final result, he wrote that it would have been easier to
recreate the whole work rather than editing the text: ‘je te puis asseurer qu’il m’auroit
esté moins penible de bastir l’oeuvre tout de neuf, que de l’avoir tronqué en plusieurs
endroits, changé, innové, adjousté, et supprimé en d’autres, ayant esté quasi contraint
luy donner nouuelle forme’. 427 As will be shown later, his role as editor-corrector was
influenced by his humanist ideal of edification.
Boaistuau did not dedicate his collection to Marguerite of Navarre, as one might have
expected. Instead, he chose Marguerite of Bourbon, Duchess of Nevers and niece by
marriage to the Queen of Navarre: ‘Histoires des amans fortunez, dédiées à très
424 Boaistuau, P., Histoires des amans fortunez. Bold font is mine. This copy was most probably Adrien
de Thou’s manuscript of 1553, prepared for an edition which was never published.
425 See Richardson, B., Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: the Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-
1600 (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp. 185-186. Also see Slights, W. W. E., Managing Readers: Printed
Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor, 2001) on a general level.
426 Cazauran, N., ‘Boaistuau et Gruget éditeurs de L’Heptaméron: à chacun sa part’, in Bessire, F. (ed.),
L’Écrivain éditeur, vol. 1: Du Moyen Âge à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, 2001), p. 153.
427 Boaistuau, P., Histoires des amans fortunez, Au lecteur. The intention of this phrase was to prove
the difficulty of the editor’s task (as will be shown in Chapter Four, a similar phrase was used in
Chelidonius Tigurinus’s Epistre) but also to praise Boaistuau’s scholarly capabilities.
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