Works
His works were very numerous. In some of them he took a strong critical line with mythological and counterfeit material current as fact in the early modern period. This brought him the admiration of major Enlightenment intellectuals. Jonathan Israel writes:
...the real work of discrediting and disposing of the Oracula Sibyllina, Chaldean chronicles, and Orphic hymns, ... seemingly only began, as Diderot noted in 1751, in the 1650s when the Huguenot scholar David Blondel ... published his treatise on the Oracula in Amsterdam.
In his dissertation on Pope Joan (1647), he came to the conclusion, now generally accepted, that the story is a myth. Edward Gibbon wrote this in The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire:
She was annihilated by two learned protestants, Blondel and Bayle
Indignation against him on account of this book came from Protestant polemicists.
His 1628 book against Francisco Torres conclusively demonstrated that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were a very learned forgery. This work was praised by Voltaire, writing in his Dictionnaire Philosophique. Blondel tracked down sources actually used by the Pseudo-Isidore. Later scholarship has sustained his conclusions.
In a work written as he was going blind, he struck back against Jean-Jacques Chifflet, who had written in favour of the Spanish royal family's genealogical claims, over those of the French kings. In 1655 he produced an anthology of extracts arguing for Protestant eirenicism
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“I cannot spare water or wine, Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;
From the earth-poles to the line, All between that works or grows,
Every thing is kin of mine.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Now they express
All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)