Use and purpose of ‘Examin’d’

The passage below is from A History of the Index by Dennis Duncan.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century British politics was arranged broadly into two factions, the Tories and the Whigs. At the heart of their contentions was a bitter disagreement over the role of the monarchy, and over the status of the Stuart royal line, a Catholic dynasty, deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688/ Much of the public skirmishing between the two factions was conducted through the medium of the political pamphlet, a rough-and-tumble warfare in which pamphleteers were always acidic, regularly anonymous and sometimes ventriloquized their enemies to make them seem rabid, obtuse or both. Into this febrile publishing environment came the mock index. Here a book by a figure of one persuasion would be treated to an index compiled by someone of the other (persuasion), with entries designed to ridicule the main text, to draw attention to its moments of banality or pompousness, its sympathy for foreigners or Catholics, or sometimes even just its sloppy grammar. Macaulay may have thundered at such indexes, fearing that – even in the mid nineteenth century – he might fall victim to one himself, but he was also able to concede their genius. In his own library – and now preserved at the Bodleian in Oxford – he possessed a satirical work from 1698 which featured as its climax a spectacularly derisive index. The work, attributed to Charles Boyle, was entitled Dr Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, Examin’d, and on its rear flyleaf, in a page of scrawling, pencilled annotation, Macaulay has declared it ‘a masterpiece in its way’. In order to understand why Macaulay should have considered this satire a masterpiece – and why he would qualify that appraisal by adding ‘in its way’ –let us turn to our first bout: Boyle vs Bentley.

I think I know the literal meaning of ‘Examin’d’, that is, ‘examine’ means ‘to look at/up/into something carefully and thoroughly’.

But when I googled about ‘Examin’d’, I found out it is usually used in books published about two or three hundred years ago. Is putting ‘Examin’d’ in the end of a book’s title was just a kind of fashion of that age as a way of raising up its credibility, that is, bragging about the book that it is thoroughly examined?

Thanks in advance.