Brockhurst divides Batman’s alterations into the following categories: editorial changes; modernising of the language; omissions; and additions of material.^[41] The last two consist of expansion of Biblical texts and their more detailed ascription to context; replacements with other material; references to, quotations from or paraphrases of modern authors; and original comments and explanations. These serve as a window into an area of confrontation between old and new knowledge about the world and supply a wealth of ethnographic detail, responses to new discoveries and comments on social or political events.

Batman’s re-issuing and updating of ‘Properties’ confronts us again with the contrast between Bartholomew’s Franciscan compilation — with its layers of accrued and hidden meanings awaiting interpretation, written to cater for the specific needs of a controversial new order of mendicant preachers in a frontier area of Christendom — and the urban print culture of late-Elizabethan London. How and why did ‘Properties’ cross so many barriers separating different cultural attitudes and expectations? Batman’s edition is a densely packed source of contemporary comment on Bartholomew, but only some aspects can be looked at in detail here. One is the self-reflexive nature of his comments on Bartholomew; another is the way his responses accord with other evidence for the wish to collect knowledge, possessions and prestige at individual and national levels; a third is the evidence it supplies for the basic continuity of medieval cosmological beliefs well into the early-modern period. David Greetham argues that Batman uppon Bartholome allows us to see medieval beliefs persisting far later than one might expect.^[42]

In the preliminary pages, Batman identifies himself as a new compiler, acknowledges his patron, and addresses his readers in prologues that emphasise their sophistication in contrast to the archaism of the work. The title page at once points to those features of Bartholome that differentiate it from earlier versions of ‘Properties’: Batman's personal role as author and promoter (a role distinct from that of printer); his personally chosen and composed additions and emendations; his use of an updated range of modern authorities; and his optimistic claim that book-readers might be found among ‘all estates’.^[43] Batman distances himself and his reader from the earlier work, implying that it is obsolete and incomplete, and emphasising the up-to-date and practical nature of his own version:

Batman used as his copy-text Berthelet’s 1535 edition, but made further changes to the presentation, the language and the content, the appearance and the overall character of the medieval work. In marginal comments, he refers to De Worde's version as ‘the olde coppye’.^[45]

In his address to the reader, Batman sums up the way he changes Properties. Having acknowledged its established reputation, he is going to use the work as a foundation upon which to construct a new account of the properties of things, within a modernised cosmography and geography, from the works of modern writers. His comments and additions demonstrate that his understanding of the physical world was not fundamentally dissimilar to that of Bartholomew, but that his purpose in issuing the work anew was overtly didactic and corrective. They reflect not only his interests and knowledge, but his position as a Protestant clergyman in the difficult later years of Elizabeth’s reign, with links, through his patrons, to the centre of government.