Histoires prodigieuses (édition de 1561). Edition critique (review)

French sixteenth-century humanist Pierre Boaistuau's best-known work is a printed compendium of wonders known as the Histoires prodigieuses. While the Histoires prodigieuses has appeared before in a modern edition, this is the first with full scholarly apparatus, and is the fruit of a collaborative effort by two eminent scholars of sixteenth-century French history and literature: Stephen Bamforth and Jean Céard. As well as being a thorough scholarly edition, this work breaks new ground in its assessment of the work's publication history and images, and of the religious affiliation of the author. Boaistuau's most productive period coincided with the build-up of religious dissent in sixteenth-century France and the onset of the Wars of Religion. He died in 1566, and upon his death was completing a study of the ways in which the Catholic Church had been persecuted.

Yet this was not what it might at first appear, as research presented in this scholarly edition reveals. As Bamforth argues in his Introduction to this edition, Boaistuau was himself almost certainly a Protestant (his last book is concerned with early martyrs, not sixteenth-century Catholics), and his Protestantism has implications for understanding the production and content of the Histoires prodigieuses. Boaistuau's other major publications included translations of Marguerite de Navarre and Matteo Bandello, and his own 1558 Theatre du monde, a compilation of moralizing tales. The Histoires prodigieuses, however, was Boaistuau's most popular and widely circulated work.

First published in Paris in 1560, and appearing in a new edition of 1561 that forms the basis for this publication, the Histoires prodigieuses contains a series of 40 chapters that deal thematically with various wonders and disasters of the natural world. These include fires, floods, and earthquakes, as well as more esoteric topics such as prodigious feasts and extraordinary snakes. It belongs to a genre known as the wonder book; compendia which sought to collect and explain the bizarre phenomena of the natural world. Céard's La nature et les prodiges of 1977 (revised edition 1996), is the best study to date of this genre, particularly in France. Céard's contribution to this scholarly edition of Boaistuau consists primarily of extensive footnotes to the text, as well as an extended discussion of Boaistuau's intellectual context and debts; both aspects will be valuable to scholars of Boaistuau and of the intellectual culture of the sixteenth century.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this project is Bamforth's well over 200-page Introduction. Alongside a close study of Boaistuau's life, and the details of how the Histoires prodigieuses' text and images were prepared, the Introduction includes an exceptionally thorough descriptive analysis of all known editions of the book, and it tracks how several rival publishers produced different editions. Bamforth has also identified and catalogued all the later, expanded volumes of the Histoires prodigieuses produced with new material by authors Claude Tesserant, François de Belleforest, Arnaud Sorbin, Rod Hoyer, and the today unknown 'I. D. M'. While the contents of these later books do not receive the same level of close attention, the bibliographical work found here provides a crucial foundation for further study.

This book will also complement Bamforth's sumptuous 2000 edition, with colour pictures and translation into English, of the 1559 manuscript of the Histoires prodigieuses presented to Elizabeth I, and held today in the Wellcome Trust Library in London. In this new work, Bamforth provides a detailed analysis of the intersection of print and manuscript culture in the sixteenth century, and reveals how subtle differences and deletions of texts and images (such as an image of female nudity, as well as passages that too obviously reveal Boaistuau's Protestant sympathies), change across various formats.

As electronic copies of early modern books are more commonly available online, simple facsimiles of early books are increasingly redundant...