PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

(particularly in German) which clearly stated the same educational purposes in their
front pages.
Boaistuau’s Histoires prodigieuses has been examined primarily in relation to the
study of early modern wonders and the occult in general. Ernest Martin, as early as
1880, identified Histoires prodigieuses within the wider context of the history of
monsters, and monstrous births in particular – which remains the dominant viewpoint
of scholarship focusing on this work. 52 The first critical edition was published in 1961
by Yves Florenne, who associated the book’s contents to fields of study such as
French humanism and portent lore. 53 Gisele Mathieu-Castellani’s second critical
edition in 1996 retained a similar perspective of Histoires prodigieuses, also stating
its links to the study of natural philosophy. 54 In 2000 appeared a third critical edition
by Stephen Bamforth (of a special copy of the work prepared for Elizabeth I), who
maintained the interest in monsters but also introduced new perspectives such as the
work’s relation to print culture. 55 In the intermediate period of almost forty years
between Florenne’s and Bamforth’s studies, several works have turned their attention
to certain aspects of monsters in Boaistuau’s book, or have fleetingly mentioned its
contents in one way or another. An example is Suzanne Magnanini’s article which
employed the Hydra monster as described by Boaistuau in Histoires prodigieuses in
order to reconstruct a genealogy of the Hydra accounts in early modern prodigy books
52 Martin, E., Histoire des monstres depuis l’antiquité jusqu’ a nos jours (Paris, 1880), p. 270.
53 Boaistuau (ed. Y. Florenne), Histoires prodigieuses (Paris, 1961). Also see Florenne, Y., ‘Un quêteur
de prodiges’, Mercure de France, vol. 342 (1961), pp. 657-668.
54 Boaistuau, P. (ed. G. M.-Castellani), Histoires prodigieuses (Geneva, 1996).
55 Boaistuau, P. (ed. S. Bamforth), Histoires prodigieuses, MS 136 Wellcome library (Milan, 2000).
The examination of the new critical edition – Boaistuau, P. (eds. J. Céard and S. Bamforth), Histoires
prodigieuses (édition de 1561) (Geneva, 2010) – was not possible.
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