BAYLE, Pierre.

£3,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

An Historical and Critical Dictionary. First edition in English, following the first and second editions in French published in 1697 and 1702 respectively. "For over half a century, until the publication of the Encyclopédie, Bayle's Dictionnaire dominated enlightened thinking in every part of Europe" (PMM).French Protestant Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) wrote his Dictionnaire while in self-imposed exile in Rotterdam as an "anti-clerical counterblast to Moreri's [Le Grand Dictionnaire Historique, 1674], in order, as he put it, 'to rectify Moreri's mistakes and fill the gaps'. Bayle championed reason against belief, philosophy against religion, tolerance against superstition" (ibid.). The dictionary contains some 2,000 entries, including mostly biographies of religious and historical figures as well as writers, in the latter case focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also articles on geography, all bolstered with a vast array of shoulder and footnotes. The views he expressed in his detailed Life of Mahomet, which, in radical opposition with the opinion of the Church, "stresses the superior tolerance and rationality of Islam's core teaching" (Israel), were reasserted by Voltaire in his Traité sur la tolérance (1763).This first English edition was somewhat abridged, but the editors included additions and corrections made by Bayle in his own annotated copy of the 1702 French edition. The identity of the translator remains uncertain. Isabel Rivers and Elena Muceni ide

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