Dictionaire Historique Et Critique. Bayle, Pierre.

First edition of Bayle's dictionary, a tremendous influence on the age of Enlightenment; "for over half a century, until the publication of the Encyclopédie, Bayle's Dictionnaire dominated enlightened thinking in every part of Europe" (PMM). The 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 Bayle expressed in his detailed biography of Muhammad, which, in radical opposition with the opinion of the Church, "stresses the superior tolerance and rationality of Islam's core teaching" (Israel, p. 618), were reasserted by Voltaire in his Traité sur la tolérance (1763). En français dans le texte 129; Printing and the Mind of Man 155. Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 2006. Two volumes bound in 4, folio (369 x 236 mm). Contemporary sprinkled calf, twin red and brown labels, gilt in compartments, red speckled edges. Engraved vignette to title pages, historiated capitals and tailpieces. Neat restoration at spine ends. Light browning, G2 and G3 bound in reverse sequence in vol. I, small wormhole gutter of vol. I not affecting text. A very good copy.