An Historical And Critical Dictionary. Translated Into English, With Many Additions And Corrections, Made By The Author Himself, That Are Not In The French Editions. Bayle, Pierre.

First edition in English, following the first and second editions in French published in 1697 and 1702 respectively. "For over half a century, until the publication of the Encyclopédie, Bayle's Dictionnaire dominated enlightened thinking in every part of Europe" (PMM). 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 he expressed in his detailed Life of Mahomet, which, in radical opposition with the opinion of the Church, "stresses the superior tolerance and rationality of Islam's core teaching" (Israel), were reasserted by Voltaire in his Traité sur la tolérance (1763). This first English edition was somewhat abridged, but the editors included additions and corrections made by Bayle in his own annotated copy of the 1702 French edition. The identity of the translator remains uncertain. Isabel Rivers and Elena Muceni identify Bayle's Huguenot friend Michel de la Roche as the most likely translator, probably with the assistance of others. Mikko Tolonen suggests Bernard Mandeville as a possible translator in his Mandeville and Hume (2013), but this is doubted by Muceni (for questions of translation, see Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, 2016, p. 288). ESTC T143095; see Printing and the Mind of Man 155b for first French edition; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 2001. Four volumes bound in 2, folio (361 x 231 mm). Contemporary mottled calf, rebacked, red marbled endpapers, cloth inner hinge supports, red speckled edges. Bookplates of Gaddsden library to front pastedowns (and front free endpaper verso of second volume), ink and pencil shelfmarks to initial binder's blank. Title and half-title of part IV bound preceding p. 2319 (correctly it would be after p. 2434). Bindings recornered with patch of calf replaced. A few tiny holes with loss to a few letters and very occasional minor peripheral chips not affecting text, a few leaves with closed tears occasionally affecting text, running dampstaining at head of vol. II. A very good copy.