Pierre Bayle's place in historiography and historiography from Pierre Bayle

: receptions, comments and possibilities

Resumen

This article consists of an analysis of the historiographical production of the French author Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), a thinker who, due to religious persecution, built his literate career in exile in the Netherlands. At first, is made a balance of the studies that were dedicated to evaluating the historical knowledge produced by Pierre Bayle. It is about situating the place of this author in historiography. There is little research dedicated to this topic. In a second moment, attention turns to the Baylian texts themselves, extracting from them elements that constitute a sophisticated and complex thought about history. Ethics, epistemology, criticism and what was here called a politics of writing are articulated in the Baylian reasoning of writing history. The present study, moreover, indicates that documental criticism and attention to material culture, constitutive of the nineteenth-century historiographic matrix, were also present in seventeenth-century practices of inquiry into the past.

KEY-WORDS: historiography, source criticism, enunciative ethics, epistemology.