Dictionaire historique et critique

About this book

This version of the Dictionnaire historique et critique is based on the 1730 and 1740 Amsterdam editions, called the fourth and fifth editions. It comprises four in-folio volumes (719, 915, 831 and 804 pages per volume). In addition to the text of the Dictionnaire proper (text and notes), the work includes numerous auxiliary pieces. Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique stands as the supreme achievement of one of the seventeenth century's most prominent men of letters. The Bayle Dictionnaire has been called the "Arsenal of the Enlightenment", pillaged and re-edited throughout the eighteenth century by believers and sceptics alike who gathered ammunition for philosophical argument in the work's recondite notes.