The Politics of Appropriation: Erasmus and Bayle
Over the centuries, the local elites of Rotterdam have gone out of their way to cultivate the memory of Erasmus. From the sixteenth century onwards to this day, he has been consistently put forward as the city’s greatest son. During the early 1690’s, when Pierre Bayle, “le philosophe de Rotterdam”, was facing dismissal as professor of the Illustrious School of Rotterdam, he launched an attempt to save his position by reminding his employers of his allegiance to Erasmus’ heritage. Although Bayle would be fired just the same, we have every reason to take his Erasmianism seriously. In particular, Bayle’s critical attitude as an historian is reminiscent of Erasmus’ philological stance.
The Dustbin of the Republic of Letters: Pierre Bayle’s “Dictionaire” as an encyclopedic palimpsest of errors
Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, a landmark in intellectual history, is a curious text. Originally intended as a collection of all errors, it became an encyclopedia of everything, enfolding rampantly growing footnotes that commented on every imaginable topic. Instead of looking at Bayle's theoretical statements in the Dictionnaire, I explore Bayle's writing practice, his critical method and his practice of forming judgments. A close study of the textual, paratextual and contextual characteristics of the first entry of the Dictionnaire (the entry "Abaris") allows me to fi nd out how Bayle made up his mind at every stage during a contemporaneous controversy on divination. In this way, we are able to see Bayle's mind in action while he is judging the contradictory information he receives and the to-and-fro movement of changing opinions he is confronted with. Th is examination yields new insights to Bayle's practical attitudes towards key issues in his oeuvre, including scepticism, rationalism, superstition and tolerance. At the same time, the article clarifi es how Bayle was involved in the Republic of Letters and how he related to his local context in Rotterdam.
Empirical History and the Transformation of Political Criticism in France from Bodin to Bayle
This article shows how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century arguments about historical evidence and elite humanist traditions of textual criticism and historical method evolved into the secular political theory of the eighteenth century. It shows how the French crown sponsored scholars who worked on empirical, source-based history as a tool for political prudence, but as this critical historical methodology became public, the crown realized it could be used against its interests, as in the case of the Affaire de Thou. In the mid-seventeenth century, Colbert sought to suppress the old royal humanist historical tradition; however a number of political critics such as Amelot de La Houssaye and Pierre Bayle worked to publicize the tools of historical, political criticism, setting the stage for Enlightenment critics of absolutism such as Durey de Meinières and ultimately Montesquieu and Gibbon.