Historical and Critical Dictionary

The "Historical and Critical Dictionary" appeared in 1697 and for more than a century and a half remained a fixed star in the European intellectual firmament. One man, Pierre Bayle, a French Protestant emigré living in Rotterdam, was able to record, froam A to Z, and in more than seven million words, all the issues that the age of Louis XIV had to offer the intellectually curious.
Bayle's discursive investigation of queens and courtesans, mystics and philosophers, prophets and charlatans, fascinated and inspired both his contemporaries and his successors. Diderot,Leibniz, Voltaire, Berkeley, Hume, Jefferson are but a few who were indebted to Bayle for his brilliance, his erudition, his wit, his catholicity, and, not least, his skepticism.
This new edition is an updating of Richard Popkin's superb translation of 1965 for Library of Liberal Arts. It is the most extensive since the eighteenth century.

"BAYLE IS INDISPENSABLE TO UNDERSTANDING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY and the birth of modern critical consciousness. There is no better introduction to Pierre Bayle or to deeper study of him than Richard Popkin's selection in this Hackett volume". - ALAN KORS, "The Universe of Pennsylvania".