Setting out, as Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) did, to discover who was the real author of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) was, at the end of the seventeenth century, anything but a purely philological exercise. On the contrary, in the eyes of the contemporary reader and in Bayle's own hands, this incursion into the realm of history and philology had a significance steeped in politics. The Vindiciae continued to maintain intact the full subversive charge with which it had been read and interpreted over the course of an entire century, in different countries and against different historical backdrops: from the France of Henry III to Cromwell's England and amid the political battles and religious controversies that divided Holland between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Philology and politics

Announced in 1690, Pierre Bayle's Projet et fragmens d'un Dictionaire critique was not actually published until two years later, in the full flush of the dispute with his co-religionist Pierre Jurieu. The work contained, in the form of a fragment, the Dissertation concernant le livre d'Etienne Junius Brutus, imprimé l'an 1579, namely a critical and literary appraisal of the author or authors of the famous Vindiciae. In 1696 Bayle once more proposed the Dissertation to the public, among the appendix additions to his Dictionnaire historique et critique.