Pierre Bayle's

DICTIONAIRE HISTORIQUE ET CRITIQUE

• Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique and the ARTFL Project

• Description of the Text

• Particularities of the Text

• Bayle Resources on the Web

• Editions of the Dictionnaire

• Go to prototype Search Form for Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique.

Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique and the ARTFL Project.

Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique stands as the supreme achievement of one of the seventeenth century's most prominent men of letters. Based in Rotterdam, Bayle animated intellectual discussion in Europe through his work as editor and author and as a prolific correspondant. Originally conceived as a response to the errors in Louis Moréri's Grand dictionnaire historique, his Dictionnaire historique et critique grew to be an exemplary work of critical methodology. The author painstakingly compiled, compared, questioned, seeking some degree of historical certainty, however small. 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. In addition to the eight French editions in fifty years, the Dictionnaire was translated into English (two versions, 1709, 1734-1741) and German (1741-1744).

The ARTFL Project has built an electronic version of the first volume of this monumental work. It is the goal of this undertaking to make Bayle's Dictionnaire both more accessible and easier to consult. The basic model for this project is that of the book itself: we have created images of each individual page. The user can "turn" to a specific page by indicating the desired page number or "look up" an article by typing the headword (a complete list for volume I is provided). From the initial page of the article (for example, "Adam", volume I, page 72), the user can then browse through the text going forward or backward. In addition, users can search the entire text of the "Table du Dictionnaire historique et critique", which has been captured in machine-readable form. This 100-page thematic index contains thousands of references to items in the text, identified by volume and page number. In the ARTFL version, these references function as automatic hypertext links back to the corresponding page image. When combined, these two procedures--article searches and index searches--should allow users to locate articles within the Dictionnaire and to discover new material of related interest.

Steps in development to date:

• Scanning of all four volumes of the 1740 Amsterdam edition. (See below the list of Editions of the Dictionnaire below.) Each image is identified by page number.

• Compilation of a table of contents that correlates page numbers with the article headwords.

• Creation of a search engine that finds either page numbers or article headwords. The list of article headwords has been configured as links to the page images for each article.

• Capture of the index in machine-readable form ("Table du Dictionnaire historique et critique", volume IV, pages 711-804).

• Creation of links between the index and the page images. The ARTFL version of Bayle's Dictionnaire permits users to search the entire index and then access the main text through hypertext links.

Later stages in development:

• Integration of Bayle's Dictionnaire with other ARTFL databases to create further hypertextual links. For example, the Dictionnaire could be connected to the ARTFL Encyclopédie, where Bayle is mentioned in more than 100 articles.

• Capture of the full text of the Dictionnaire in machine-readable form. At present, we do not have the funds necessary to proceed with this step, but we hope to explore the possibility.

  We hope that this project will be useful and interesting to scholars in a variety of fields, both those who have worked with Bayle in the past and those who have found difficult to gain access to the Dictionnaire. In addition, we feel that the model we are using will be an important one for further development of textual databases.

Description of the text.

(The following description is based on the 1730 and 1740 Amsterdam editions, called the fourth and fifth editions. See below the list of Editions of the Dictionnaire.)

The Dictionnaire historique et critique 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.

In volume one:

• La Vie de l'Auteur, par Mr des Maizeaux
• Préface
• Observations de mr. Bayle, pour servir d'instruction aux nouveaux éditeurs du Dictionnaire de Moréri

In volume four:

• Dissertation sur les libelles diffamatoires
• Dissertation sur l'hippomane
• Dissertation sur le jour
• Dissertation qui fut imprimée [...] l'an MDCXII sous le titre de Projet d'un dictionnaire critique
• Réflexions sur un imprimé, qui a pour titre, Jugement du public, & particulièrement de l'abbé Renaudot, sur le Dictionnaire critique du sieur Bayle
• Eclaircissemens sur certaines choses répandues dans ce dictionnaire
• Alphabetical list of articles
• An extensive index of names and themes

Particularities of the text.

Bayle's Dictionnaire is notable for the complex page layout. It combines four different levels of text and notes that are defined spatially in the eighteenth-century editions in the following manner:

1. The text of the main articles is located at the top of the page, in one broad column. These articles includes notes of two types:

• Numbered references for bibliographic citations
• Lettered footnotes (indicated by upper-case letters) for the critical commentary

2. The text of the critical footnotes is found in the lower portion of the page (often they occupy much more than half the page), in two columns. Again, in this text there are further bibliographic references, indicated by either lower-case letters or numbers. The type of this commentary is slightly smaller than the typeset used for the text of the main articles.

3. The references from the main text are indicated in the margins to the left and right of the text. The italicized type used for these notes is smaller yet.

4. The references from the text of the critical commentary are, again, indicated in the margins to the left and right of the text of the commentary. The typeset here is the same used for the other marginal indications.

By providing scanned images of the original text, the ARTFL version of Bayle's Dictionnaire preserves the intricacies of the text and permits users to see how its different parts interact. Scanning is done with sufficient resolution so that even the marginal notes should be legible on a high resolution monitor. At the same time, our version provides maximal accessibility by making the index fully searchable. The entries in the index refer to all portions of the text--footnotes and marginal notes as well as the main text--, making it possible to locate many obscure references.

Bayle Resources on the Web

The Pierre Bayle Home Page, in Turin, features commentary, an extensive bibliography and announcements about events in the field of Bayle studies--an excellent resource.

The Voltaire Foundation, in Oxford, is editing Bayle's Correspondance
-- See a sample letter, to Vincent Minutoli, 31 January 1673.

Editions of the Dictionnaire

Source: Pierre Rétat, Le Dictionnaire de Bayle et la lutte philosophique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société d'Edition 'les Belles Lettres', 1971).
• 1697, Amsterdam, chez Reinier Leers; 4 parties en 2 vols. in-folio
  (See the title page of the second part of the first volume of this edition 171K)

• 1702, seconde édition, Rotterdam, chez Reinier Leers; 3 vol. in-folio

• 1715, troisième édition, Rotterdam (Geneva, Fabri et Barrillot); 3 vol. in-folio
  --première édition pirate

• 1720, troisième édition, Rotterdam, chez Michel Bohm; 4 vols. in-folio
  --Dédicace au Duc d'Orléans, surmontée de la célèbre vignette de B. Picart (203K).
  --C'est à partir de cette édition que les remarques sont dans leur ordre définitif, et que le texte des articles n'est plus uniformément en haut des pages, mais à la suite des notes du précédent article.

• 1730, quatrième édition, Amsterdam, chez P. Brunel, et al; 4 vols. in-folio
  --Avec la vie de l'auteur par Mr des Maizeaux

• 1734, cinquième édition, Amsterdam, Compagnie des Libraires; 5 vols. in-folio
  --Remarques de l'abbé Le Clerc à la fin de chaque volume

• 1738, cinquième édition, Bâle, chez Jean-Louis Brandmuller; 4 vols. in-folio
  --C'est une réimpression de l'édition de 1730, dont l'Avertissement est reproduit sans modification. La pagination est la même. Le papier et l'impression sont très mauvais.

• 1740, cinquième édition, Amsterdam, Leyde, La Haye, Utrecht; 4 vols. in-folio
  Cette édition est une copie de celle de 1730; la pagination est la même.

• 1741, Bâle; 4 vols. in-folio

• 1801-1804, Leipzig, P. Phil. Wolf; 8 parties in-8 ont paru (juqu'à l'article Hoornbeck)

• 1820, éd. Beuchot, nouvelle édition, Paris, Desoer; 16 vols. in-8

• 1830, douzième édition, Paris, C.V. Duriez, Crevot; deux vols. in-8 parus (jusqu'à l'article Alting

Reproductions.

• The 1720 edition is reproduced on microfilm by the Yale University Photographic Services (1983), 1 microfilm reel

• The 1740 edition is reproduced by Slatkine Reprints in 4 volumes, 37 cm.

• The 1740 edition is reproduced in microfiche and included in the Goldsmiths'-Kress Library of Economic Literature, no. 7736

• The 1820 Desoer edition is reproduced in microopaques

Authority of the different editions.

Elisabeth Labrousse notes:

"La première édition (1696, datée 1697) ne comporte que deux volumes in-folio; à partir de la deuxième édition (1701, datée 1702), l'oeuvre couvre 4 volumes in-folio: c'est le texte définitif, le dernier publié du vivant de Bayle, mais on trouva dans les papiers de celui-ci un certain nombre d'additions qui seront incorporées dans les éditions ultérieures. A plus d'un égard, la meilleure de celles-ci est la onzième, procurée par Beuchot, Paris, 1820, 16 volumes in-8, parce qu'elle comporte des notes écrites par divers érudits du XVIIIe siècle; toutefois, si l'établissement de son texte est excellent, sa typographie est rebutante et elle souffre de trop de fautes d'impression.

"La cinquième édition (1730) et la huitième (1740), publiées en Hollande, qui s'intitulent respectivement quatrième et cinquième édition--parce que leur numération exclut les éditions pirates faites à Genève (1715), à Trévoux (1734) et à Bâle (1738)--, sont les meilleures, et quant au texte, et quant à la clarté et à la beauté de la typographie."

Source: Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle et l'instrument critique (Paris, Seghers "Philosophes de tous les temps", 1965), p. 183.

Return to the Dictionnaires d'autrefois home