The Many Lives of Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique in the Eighteenth Century

Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) became the most widely owned text in French private libraries in the second half of the eighteenth century. This article describes the influence of the Dictionnaire on scholarly controversies in the eighteenth century, exploring various competing dictionary projects in relation to Bayle’s arguments and the connection between the religious and philosophical controversies of the period and the increasingly popular dictionary format.