Volume 8, Number 5 · March 23, 1967
Subversive Activities
By D.P. Walker
Pierre Bayle: Vol 1. Du pays de Foix à la cité d' Erasme
by Elisabeth Labrousse
Nijhoff (The Hague), Vol. 1, 280 pp., 31.50 guilders
Pierre Bayle: Vol. 2. Hétérodoxie et rigorisme
by Elisabeth Labrousse
Nijhoff (The Hague), Vol. 2, 639 pp., 65 guilders
Inventaire critique de la correspondance de Pierre Bayle
by Elisabeth Labrousse
Editions Vrin (Paris), 416 pp., 42 Frs.
Pierre Bayle et l'instrument critique
by Elisabeth Labrousse
Editions Seghers (Paris), 192 pp., 7 Frs. 10
Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy
by Walter Rex
Nijhoff (The Hague), 271 pp., 28.75 guilders
Pierre Bayle le philosophe de Rotterdam, Etudes et Documents
edited by Paul Dibon
Elsevier, 255 pp., 25 florins
Historical and Critical Dictionary, Selections
by Pierre Bayle, edited and translated by Richard H. Popkin
Bobbs-Merrill, 456 pp., $6.50
At the Crossroads of Faith and Reason, An Essay on Pierre Bayle
by Karl C. Sandberg
University of Arizona, 125 pp., $6.00
In the last few years a large number of books on Pierre Bayle have appeared. Most of them are of a high quality, and deserve far more space than I can give them here. All of them are based on an interpretation of Bayle's intentions opposite to that which has, except for Sainte-Beuve, prevailed from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The traditional view of Bayle sees him as a very destructive thinker, a skeptic in nearly all fields of thought, who attacked all contemporary brands of Christianity with great vehemence and effectiveness under the rather casually worn disguise of a fideistic, ultra-orthodox Calvinist. The new interpretation takes Bayle's Calvinism to be sincere and the undeniable effects of his writings on his readers to be therefore unintentional. I believe that this interpretation is untenable, and that it has caused these excellent modern scholars to waste a considerable amount of time and space.
Review, 3345 words
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