Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Spelling was not checked systematically for any language, including English and Italian. Transcriber did change the spelling of a few names to make them consistent with their predominant spelling elsewhere in the original book, and corrected the Greek spelling in Footnote 23 (originally on page 22).

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious; most were left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of pages, have been collected, renumbered into one sequence, and placed just before the Index.

The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page references.

The table starting on page xiv originally had only vertical lines separating the columns, and (the Transcriber believes) some of the long descriptions overlapped the following entries to save paper. In the HTML version of this eBook, Transcriber has added horizontal separator lines to improve readability, and has ensured the long descriptions do not overlap other entries. (Some eReaders may not display the separator lines.) Also, dates and corresponding numbers (columns 3 and 4) are vertically centered in the HTML version of this eBook, although they originally were placed along the bottom rows of the descriptions.

Page 56: In “B^{a..}”, the “a” was printed as a small superscript with two dots below it.

Page 136: “he had two daughters: Ersilia (b. 1535), and Polifila (b. 1573)” was printed that way, but one of the dates likely was misprinted.