A hundred years after Columbus, written sources show a continued sense of the decay of the world and an expectation of its ending. Astronomical events, unusual weather, bad harvests, and national and international conflict seemed to point to the fulfilment of this prophecy.[98] While for Columbus, a Catholic, the apocalyptic vision had been that of the new heaven and the new earth, for English Protestants such as John Bale and Stephen Batman it was the downfall of Antichrist, identifiable with the papacy in the climate of the times.[99] Contemporary works warning of imminent apocalypse include Batman’s verse tract of 1581, to which he refers in Book 18 at the end of Bartholomew’s chapter about the dragon: ‘Of the wonderful greatnesse of Dragons and how manye sortes hath bene, and of the mischiefes they have done, read the Chronicle of the Doome.’[100] In Book 11, he adds a margin note to the column text in the chapter on the rainbow: ‘That the rainbowe shall not be seene 40 yeares before the dome.’[101] Such comments indicate that Batman saw his own and others’ printed books, especially ‘Properties’, as tools to use not only for declaring political abuses, but also for saving the souls of his parishioners by reminding them that the end was near.
Bartholomew’s chapters on rumoured monsters provide another platform from which Batman inveighs against what he sees as corruption and wickedness, moral and political, in his own country. From his identification of abhorrent and monstrous creatures with the religious sect known as The Family of Love, for example, we can see something of the way the print medium helped to direct establishment hostility towards such non-conformists. In 1578 Batman had likened the founder of the sect, Henry Nicholas, to the monster ‘onacratolus’, and in 1580 the queen issued a Proclamation against the Sectaries of the Family of Love, ordered their books to be burned and members to be imprisoned, but they continued to spread.[102] In Book 5 on the chapter on the head, the column text mentions the fish ‘Lamia, that hath as the Glose saith … an head as a maide, and bodie like a grimme beast’. Here Batman adds a long margin note describing the monster:
Lamie, a kinde of women, by whose sight infants are frighted, & become Elues, they be also those that bee called Ladies of the Fairies, which do allure yong men to company carnaly with them, & after those men are consumed by lechery, they deuour them.[103]
It is arguable that the ‘lamia’ signified for Batman moral corruption, non-conformist sects and, in particular, the Family of Love. In a copy of The Doctrine of the Heart, written in English in an early-fifteenth-century hand, Batman had made a marginal drawing of a scaly bird with a woman’s head, wearing a steeple head-dress, and another of a man with a balance; it seems reasonable to speculate on a possible connection between this image of a woman-headed bird and Batman’s marginal comment in Book 5.[104] Similarly, in Book 12 against Bartholomew’s chapter on mergus, the cormorant, he adds: ‘Of the doung of these filthie sectes have proceeded a newe Mergus, a cormorant foule, the familie of love.’[105] Batman’s shafts aimed at the Family of Love from the margins of Bartholome and elsewhere are consistent with the evidence that extreme nonconformist sects were being suppressed during the 1580s.
It is important to note that even though the editions printed by De Worde and by Berthelet, and re-interpreted by Stephen Batman, give Properties the appearance of an expository rather than a devotional text, a reader could still find confirmation in them of the belief that the cosmos and the properties of the things within it displayed God’s creation of, and purpose for, the world. This was fundamental doctrine for Catholics and Protestants alike. In spite of new discoveries and technologies, at the start of the early modern period Bartholomew’s work still supported with its authority a fundamentally medieval conception of the physical world and the larger cosmos, of world history, and of belief in the coming of Judgement Day founded on the Bible’s teaching. We can conclude that it was a safe text for readers whatever the prevailing orthodoxy during the reigns of Henry, Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, being an explicitly utilitarian text that could lend itself to a covert devotional purpose.